


Between The Flesh And The Glass

by lalalive



Category: Muse
Genre: Alternate Universe, Body Horror, Drug Addiction, Drug Use, Explicit Language, Explicit Sexual Content, M/M, Psychological Horror
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-01-02
Updated: 2015-05-31
Packaged: 2017-11-23 09:38:06
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 8
Words: 23,450
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/620703
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lalalive/pseuds/lalalive
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In the year 2166, Matt works as a cryogenicist for the International System of Health. He volunteers to be the first person cryogenically frozen for 100 years. When he wakes up, he finds he has to re-learn how to be human.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Prologue

June 16, 2166

In 10 hours, I'm going to die. Well, not really but sort of. 

When I volunteered for the project last year, everyone thought I was insane. It didn't phase me, really. They would have thought that of anyone who willingly decided to be cryogenically frozen for 100 years. I assume their opinion was escalated because I was one of the lead scientists at the International System of Health. At first they were operating under the guise that the project couldn't function without me. I saw right through that shit. Once I broke that down, they just admitted that they couldn't understand why I would. Surely, I had something to live for?

My work? Frankly, I could use a break.

My family? Don't have one. And the last remaining threads of the one I used to have can fuck right off.

Friends? Don't have any of those either, unless you count my dealer. But he doesn't exactly call to shoot the shit, if you know what I mean. 

I know what you're thinking. 'Jesus, Matt, if you need a break from work just take a vacation.' Right. Well, fuck you. I could go on vacation but what would I do? I have no one to go with and nowhere I care to go. But the one thing I've always wanted to do was time travel. You would think, since we've cured most of the diseases Earth has suffered, we can freeze people for some years to cure the ones we can't, and we've figured out how to print in 3D, that we would have built a time machine. 

Nope.

And doing this is the closest thing I'll come to making my dream come true. 

Besides, 100 years of basically sleeping? _Fuck yes._

Shut up, I'm not stupid. I'm a cryogenist not an idealist. I know that there's more to this than just sleeping. This is the closest thing I'll come to dying and being resurrected. There's a chance I won't be resurrected at all. It's going to hurt like fuck and probably worse. I told you I was the lead scientist on this project, I know the fucking risks. I just wish there wasn't so much paperwork. 

After signing about seventy pages of release forms, I had to work through an entire book on what the government and the facility would do with my assets. I worked through page after page of what I would and wouldn't be allowed to do, endless streams of legal verbiage about my car (my sexy little hover craft, fuck I am going to miss you), my research in the department being turned over to someone else, my closest living kin. I couldn't have cared less about any of these things aside from my house. One hundred years was a long time, and I knew damn well none of the shit I cared about today would be around in the future. All that really mattered was my house. 

When I wake up, 100 years from now, the only thing that will be on my mind is if I have a place to stay. Truthfully, I am not too pleased with what's happening to it. My house would remain in tact, members of our department would stay in it through cycles of no more than five years. This was excellent news, in that it meant my house would still be there when I woke up. It was bad in that this was my personal and private space, and I don't care who you are, you don't want a strange motherfucker roaming around your shit. It doesn't exactly make you feel warm and fuzzy inside. 

By the time I got home from the facility, I was already aching for a fix. The irritating twitch in my middle finger was coming back. I hate that. 

Sitting on my king size bed, in nothing but my black briefs, I unroll the leather pouch that has my stash of Necozine. This is the drug to to beat all drugs and you've probably never heard of it. That's not an insult, it's just the truth. See, this is the drug the ISH doesn't want you to know about. Why?

Because we invented it.

Actually, this drug was an accident. A mishap in the lab that cost a lot of people a fuckload of money and only three people their jobs. I got my hands on it because a buddy of mine knew a guy with the right pass codes and the right information. I owe those blokes everything. 

I was never meant to be addicted, though. See, I'm too fucking curious for my own nature. I couldn't help myself. But what the fuck would you do if you found out the company you worked for put a synesthetic under lock and key? It was too easy and it was too fascinating. I just wanted to try it. Just once. 

Once turned into twice turned into 10 turned into I-lost-fucking-count-but-I-don't-even-care. No one had ever tried it. No one knew the side effects. All we knew is that the formula had been written down in excruciating detail and I knew where to get it.

Me and my endless supply of Necozine. Best friends forever. 

I fill the syringe with the liquid that looks like absinthe but probably tastes like glycerine. It took weeks of trial and error to figure out how to use it. Injecting the needle into your arm made you violently ill; the vein in your hand never allowed it to circulate and took no effect. No, the only way for this drug to work was if you injected it straight into your femoral artery. That gave you the best high in the quickest fashion.

Sliding back to my pillows, I kick the pouch to the side and spread my legs wide. I can see myself in the mirror in front of my closet and smile. Fuck you, I'm a pretty bastard. A short chirping from my mobile interrupts me. Picking up the glass rectangle, I see that it's my boss, Nathan. He's probably checking in to make sure I'm ok, that my nerves are settled. That I wouldn't be a pussy and back out right before show time. I ignore the phone call and slide the glass mobile away from me.

Fuck off, Nathan, I'm in the middle of injecting liquid courage. 

As usual, the needle glides in with little more than an awkward prick, meeting no resistance from me at all. Eyes wide open, I stare around my bedroom, looking at all the little luxuries I'd be giving up, as I press the liquid into my artery. 

Twenty seconds is all it takes for me to hear colour and see sound. A sooth sensation fills my body and my muscles relax. I smile.

In 10 hours, I am going to die.

But right now, I have never felt so alive.


	2. Chapter 2

I took my time leaving the house in the morning. Because I'm a sentimental bastard, I made sure to get dressed slowly, to walk slowly, and took every inch of my house in before I left. Not that I'm a material person, but in the absence of actual people to care about, my things were what kept me company. 

My unused grand piano (because I was wealthy and wanted to be gauche), my Eta dishwasher (because I was a scientist and cared about the environment) and my SmartFridge (because I fucking need to eat). These were the things that mattered to me, sad as it is. And I was leaving them behind.

Come to think of it, I actually think it took me twenty minutes just to make toast because I stood in my kitchen staring at all my shit. 

Maybe it was the overwhelming sense of nostalgia I was dealing with, but I found myself craving one last hit of Necozine. I could almost imagine the effects of it just standing still. I didn't go through with it, though, and left it under the loose floorboard underneath my bed.

Why?

Because I'm not a dumbass. Contrary to whatever you might be thinking, I'm actually extremely smart just a bit reckless. Shooting up six hours ago was a gamble on my part, considering there was no proof that any residual chemicals would be left in my body. And if there were, there was no proof that they would react with the cryoprotectant circulating through my blood in nearly 4 hours. 

If you were a therapist, you could assume that my hesitation to leave the house was really my subconscious telling me not to go through with the experiment. But you aren't. And so, again, I say fuck you. 

And even though I spent all that time running my hands over my touch-counter, and watching the self-cleaning pool…self-clean, the only thing I really didn't want to leave behind was my car.

My Audi SR8. Also known as Helena. She was my gift to myself the year before, after I had officially volunteered, and she was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen. Her personal assistant service never back talked, her SatNav never failed, and she even remembered my birthday.

If you ask me, I never needed another human relationship.

For the last time in my long life, I swiped my finger along the pad to wake her up. The engine purred and the car raised itself a few inches above ground.

"Welcome back, Matthew."

The console glowed an appealing blue, the car coming to life beneath my hands.

My heart swelled. "Thank you, Helena. Today is our last day together."

"Yes. I remember. You told me this last year."

Oh, Helena. You were always so attentive.

I sighed. Best be getting on with it. "To the ISH, please."

"Of course."

I enjoyed the last smooth ride I would ever have in my car, making myself comfortable in the plush leather, and took several minutes before I exited. I wanted one last conversation with the love of my life.

"I'm going to miss you Helena." I felt like I was dying.

She said nothing. Helena didn't process human emotions.

"See you soon?" I tried.

"I will always wait for you, Matthew."

That was exactly what I wanted to hear.

On my way towards the building, I fell into step with Amber, a geneticist from the third floor. I took a second to admire her and briefly felt depressed. I would never get the chance to fuck her. What a shame. In one hundred years, she would be dead and gone, and her fantastic tits will be little more than a memory. Again, what a shame.

"I don't really know what to say." She turned to look at me as we scanned our fingerprint ID cards into the door before pressing our thumbs to the pad to make a match. "Good luck seems hardly appropriate." 

Christ, she had a fantastic mouth.

I humored her with a smile. "Well, with any luck I might actually live."

I'm pretty sure that put her off the conversation entirely. She moved her head in something akin to a sombre nod and almost ran away from me through the door.

What the fuck was I supposed to say? 'Gee thanks. But don't worry, I'll be fine?' Fucking no. I'm not gonna lie, not about my mortality. You can't sugar coat that shit as much as you can't avoid it. 

Walking through the building felt like walking through death row. The eyes watching me and the whispers. I didn't stop to talk with anyone, and took the stairs to the fifth floor to avoid any awkward situation that would manifest in the lifts.

I swiped my keycard as the doors slid open, 8:00AM on the dot, and I paused. From my view in the doorway, I could see most of the lab had been emptied to make room for the large cases of coolant; emptied and cleaned as though preparing for a funeral party. Everything was so _sterile._

When I entered, everyone went quiet and they turned their eyes to me. They didn't do anything. They just sat there and watched me like I was going to start crying. That was fucking irritating. 

"Oh, for fuck's sake." I rolled my eyes. Fucking drama queens.

I barely got my hands on my lab coat before my usual routine was interrupted.

"Hi, Dr. Bellamy." 

I paused with my hand on my coat and stared at the wall. "Daniel. I thought we were going to pretend today was a normal day." 

Fucking interns.

"I know, sir, you did say that." I could hear him shifting awkwardly, his shoes sliding together on the floor.

I fixed my gaze on him and he colored. As a boy, he'd idolized my work and claimed that it was what got him into science to begin with. He willingly admitted to anyone who asked that he took the internship so he could watch me work first hand. While most of the other lab technicians admired his enthusiasm, I didn't. In my eyes, he took the internship for all the wrong reasons.

In my eyes, I wanted him out. 

"So then what about this interaction is normal?" 

He was silent for a brief second. "Right. I'll, ah, leave you alone."

I could sense he was a bit hurt, considering this was our last day together for the rest of his natural life. Part of me almost felt bad for him. 

Almost.

I know you're thinking I'm a dick. And I agree, you're actually right. I am a dick. But that's a blanket statement for my general nature. You're probably wondering why I was such a rude bastard to Daniel. Allow me to explain. 

In my world, science was everything. It was a back and forth space where every time I ran an experiment, I was holding a conversation with the fabric of the universe. Constantly changing and moving, yet under my control. Infinitely more beautiful and more complex than your mother's Coq Au Vin recipe. And when you're in my world, you aren't there to fuck around and follow me around like a lost puppy. In my world, you take an internship to change yourself, not reaffirm something you already know is true. If Daniel had said, 'I'm here to learn,' then at least I would have respected him. 

But he didn't. And therefore, I couldn't find it in me to give a single fuck about his childish idealism. 

He scuttled away, a droop in his shoulders, only to be replaced a second later by Nathan.

I tugged on my coat with a sigh. 

"You're wearing so many layers, Bellamy. Why bother when you have to take 'em off in an hour?"

I snorted. "I bet you would love to see me walk around naked all morning, just for your pleasure."

His laugh was brief and I could tell it was fake. It didn't reach his eyes. After working with him for ten years, I knew when he was feigning humor to avoid tension. Of course he would revert to the first inside joke we ever formed, the one about how we were hot for each other. While it was true that he was a homosexual and my dick carried a preference for one of it's own kind, not once did we cross a line that went beyond professional friendship. And even if he had tried, I doubt I would been mad. He was brilliant, irritating at times, but he got shit done. If it weren't for him, this project wouldn't have seen the light of day for another fifteen years.

He handed me the glass board containing my files, and I slipped on the finger pad that was in my pocket to manipulate the charts. We walked towards the table in silence, and as I slid onto my stool I heard him sigh.

"What is it?" I didn't bother to look at him. I didn't very much care to know if he was getting weepy.

"Are you sure you don't want to put this off? Even for a month?"

It was my turn to sigh. "Nate," I said, finally meeting his gaze. "We put this off for six months because you were worried we hadn't done enough research. I know your dick gets hard at the prospect of theorizing, but there comes a time when theory needs to be put to practice. And I say that time is now."

"Matt -"

Fuck it. I cut him off. "I did not sell this company my formula ten years ago to sit here and beat off to a fantasy that I won't see come to fruition. We have never been more prepared. The protectant is flawless in every trial run, and none of the tissue in the Veldilator has died. We do this today."

He fixed me with a hard stare, which I returned in kind. If this was how he wanted to be, fine. If he wanted to back out, that was cool too. I'd do this shit myself. 

"It's not the research I'm worried about, Matt, it's you."

I returned my eyes to my forms, swiping aimlessly at the reports that I had already filled out meticulously. "I've seen the company therapist, Nate. I've been cleared."

"How hard did you fuck her to pass?"

I smiled at the laugh in his voice. " _He_ passed me because it turns out I'm relatively sane. And I fucked him hard enough garner a second appointment."

"Lucky for you being a prick isn't a mental illness."

The laugh we shared allowed the atmosphere to return to normal, and I was glad we could at least operate with some ease.

Unfortunately, there wasn't much for me to do. There really never is for the test subject. I spent the last hour before moving to prep flicking through my reports and admiring my work. It really was brilliant.

See, I wasn't lying when I told you I was smart. By all rights, I'm a certifiable genius - and that isn't the arrogance talking. Well, maybe it is.

For years, cryogenic freezing was used only for the dead or brain dead. If their corpse was in good enough condition, they essentially became a human vegetable patch - organs and cells ripe for harvest. Then, maybe forty years ago, a scientist named Kristopher van Wilkhen developed a formula with cybernetic nitrogen that allowed living organic tissue to be kept in a frozen state for up to ten years. In his age, he was a living god.

This process allowed the sick or terminally ill to be put on pause, their life's timeline delayed, while researchers and doctors developed curse for their diseases. Today, most human's are blessed with the gift of dying naturally.

This is where it gets good. See, I'm an attention seeking little twat, and having someone else, someone dead no less, steal all the limelight in scientific culture simply wouldn't do. When I was 18, and too smart for my own fucking good, I one upped van Wilkhen - which isn't hard with a stupid name like that. 

By tampering with the basic aspects of his formula, I developed a whole new process, using entirely different math and chemistry, that had the potential to keep organic tissue in stasis for one hundred years, perhaps more. Once I told the right people I potentially had the code of liquid life, well, it wasn't long before the money, the honorary doctorates, and the job offers started coming. 

I told you I was smart. 

The last ten years of my life were dedicated to the development, advancement, and production of advanced cryogenics. Countless nights and hours were poured into perfecting my formulas and building the right machines to keep the cells alive long enough. We'd tested on single cell organisms first, simple life, before moving upwards. It was a slow process with a lot of carnage along the way. Eventually, we started getting it right. Once we got it right multiple times in a row, we moved to mammals. 

And now, I was the first human to be tested.

I know it sounds sick, that I've become my experiment. It actually sounds fucking morbid. But I don't have a death wish. I just want to silence the world for a few years and prove myself right in the process. And if I die? Well, what a way to go.

At nine-thirty, I moved into the prep room. I clicked the button to fog the glass as I removed my clothes. I should have felt nervous or sick to my stomach….or just something. Instead, I was completely numb. Outside the doors, I heard my co-workers muttering.

_"One hundred years is a long time."_

Aren't you a fucking bright one. Figure that out on your own, did you?

_"What would drive him to volunteer?"_

That is none of your goddamn business.

_"What if something goes wrong?"_

Then you better damn well fix it. 

I slid on the neoprene briefs that would protect my dick and smiled. That felt really nice. Maybe in a hundred years I could take them outside the building to wear under my trousers. I lulled a moment, regarding my black clothes in a heap on the floor. Folding my lab coat, I placed it on the table before I draped the company robe over myself and stepped out into the holding room. 

Nothing about the room was welcoming Tables moved, except for one, hooks and cables, needles and silver metal all waiting for me to come in and die. 

Nathan stood in the corner of the room, dressed completely in white and standing next to the large tube that was to hold my body in liquid nitrogen. I suddenly felt very claustrophobic. 

In silence, I walked over to the table and sat on it. I felt my heart start to race, pounding in my years and wished that the sounds of metal on metal would block it out. I hated that everyone was being so fucking careful. If only they would make some fucking noise, then I could pretend everything was fine.

"So. I guess…lay down." Nate sounded awkward and unsure of himself saying the words, even though we had rehearsed this process a thousand and one times. He knew his lines as well as I did. Well, he had significantly more. All I had to do was nod and try not to go into cardiac arrest.

I wasn't sure whose job was more difficult.

Following his instructions, I stripped off the robe and laid down, a shiver coursing through me as my back touched cold steel.

I watched, my head turned to my right, as Nate took my beautiful liquid, the specific cryoprotectant I'd developed just for this process and filled it in the syringe. The perfectionist in me wanted to do it. As much as I trusted him, it felt wrong handing everything I worked on over to someone who could easily make a mistake.

He lingered over me for several minutes before he finally spoke.

"Ok, we are going to start with the morphine. 2000mg."

Beth, a comely girl who had only started working at the ISH two years ago came to my left and passed the IV into my hand. I didn't know what to say, so I said nothing at all.

Nate stared at the timer that had taken up the screen on the wall, waiting for it to be precisely 10:00AM. The seconds clicked by and I became more and more drowsy. My sense of time was becoming blurred and I began to smile.

A shrill beeping overwhelmed the room before Nate swiped the timer away. He brought his eyes back to me. My smile faded.

"Are you ready?" He smiled at me and, again, it was fake. I wanted to punch the expression off his face.

"Such a smart guy shouldn't ask dumb questions."

He kept speaking. I couldn't understand why he was walking me through the process - whether it was to ease his conscious or if he thought I'd forgotten it in the course of 24 hours. I designed this shit. I knew exactly what was going to happen.

"Alright." He covered his face with a surgical mask and showed me the syringe containing cryoprotectant. "This won't hurt a bit."

Now he was just being crass.

"Don't lie to me," I frowned. "It doesn't look good on you."

"You're right. This is going to hurt like a bitch." It was the final thing he said before he pushed the needle into my vein.

Initially I thought nothing was happening. In fact, I almost laughed. 

And then I started contemplating suicide. Death became a more appealing option than suffering through the agony of allowing cryoprotectant into my body. And that was with a few extra doses of morphine. I couldn't tell if the pain was maximized from the Necozine left hanging around or if I was just a pussy. Probably both.

I was blinded as the pain hit me like a mack truck. I wanted to puke, I wanted to cry. Every inch of me felt like it was being ripped from the inside out. My right wrist started to spasm violently. I curled my hands into fists to stop the movement, and I think my nails pierced the skin. My bones were trembling, starting to ache, and I bit my tongue hard enough to bleed over a scream.

I stared up at Nathan. His sad fucking eyes and his perfect fucking flesh. I fucking hated him. He should have tried harder to talk me out of this. The bastard. I wanted to beat the shit out of him, and I would have if all my muscles weren't in the process of what felt like decaying.

In a brief moment of clarity, I realized the difference between knowing the science of something and experiencing it. Knowing what was happening made it worse. Saying it and feeling it at the same time heightens your focus on it, until you can pick it apart second by second as you walk yourself through it. It isn't comforting. Not in the fucking slightest. 

And while you're picking it apart, time seems to slow. It was only supposed to last 30 seconds. That's the blink of an eye. Instead I sat there dying on a table, praying to a god I didn't believe in to get me out of the fire, for what felt like an eternity. Time can go fuck itself.

Eventually, the pain began to ease and I became light headed. My vision blurred and I was unable to tell if Nathan was really there or not. 

And then, everything was black.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter is formed like this for reasons that will become clear much later.

_Change._

_Easily occurring and drifting around and in._

_Action upon action. To tear and break apart reality. Thriving on movement._

_Voices and sound waves. Shattered and whole._

_A keypad. A different set of keys. Equipment shrinking in size, as results consume entire walls. Filling rooms. Wiped down to nothingness._

_Little obsessions to birth and build modernity._

_Enigmatic and bewildering._

_Confusing and beautiful._

_The breathing of the universe._

_~~~~_

_She was Russian. He could tell by the weight of her accent. The thick drawl seemed out of place._

_There was a man in the room with her. He was static. She was an immovable pillar. His frantic energy was too kinetic for her calm resolve. Urgency seemed to permeate the airwaves._

_"Anya." Panic laced with panic. "We have to evacuate."_

_"No, Jim, look. It's happening again. The electrical storm in his brain."_

_Distance was an impossible thing. She was too close and too far. He wanted to touch her._

_"Anya, the fire -"_

_"Is several floors away. I am not going anywhere."_

_"Don't be ridiculous. What the hell could you possibly do?"_

_"This man risked his entire existence for the sake of science. We owe it to him to do the same."_

_No fear. Not from her. Twice the man of every man._

_Leaving._

_Everyone was leaving._

_"Crazy fucking Russian."_

_An exit; not to soon._

_"Nostrovia."_

_~~~~~~~_

_They could have brought about change._

_"I can't believe we're still using this formula. It's been dated."_

_"It's the one they started the project with, so we finish with it."_

_They could have brought a new beginning._

_"Look at his brain. I wonder why it does that."_

_"His chart has shown this spontaneous activity for years. There's no pattern. I wonder if it's the brain fighting vitrification."_

_None brave enough._

_Effort lost on an entire planet._

_"That's impossible, though. It just…can't be."_

_How many would know?_

_"Don't be stupid. You're watching it happen, so clearly it can."_

_"Ok, but how? There has to be something in the synthetic…."_

_Fragments of men. Broken apart. Put together again._

_Easy to forget._

_"Maybe you should freeze yourself. See what happens."_

_"Yeah well if I do, I sure as fuck am not using this out dated piece of shit."_

_Fuck them all._

_~~~~~~_

_A storm of brainwaves reflected in tempestuous eyes._

_Irises in which to capsize._

_A blinding shade of love._

_The surface of the Earth and its axis, grounded on flesh magnets._

_"Any day now."_

_Words dripping ecstasy into calloused veins. A shell to crack._

_"You've been watching him for days, mate."_

_"I'm afraid that we've come so close now, it's easy to give up and think we've made it. Now is when everything could go wrong."_

_Words thick enough to hold. Vocals making holes in the unbearable weight of waiting._

_"It's amazing that his brain is active again so close to the end."_

_"What are you going to do when he wakes up?"_

_"How do you mean?"_

_Tempting the darkness._

_"Come on. You have this whole….fantasy."_

_"That makes me sound like I'm twelve."_

_Sounds of an escape._

_"All I'm saying is I hope you aren't disappointed in reality."_

_A trigger._

_A dawn._

_Turning off pause._

\-----

As soon as I'd grown accustomed to the dark, I felt myself get ripped apart. 

I wanted to beg Nathan to put me back under. I was begging to die. Something had gone wrong, I could tell. It was too soon. I shouldn't have been awake. It was a fucking disaster. 

Typical. I knew he'd fuck it up.

First it was the fire. No. It was cold. Too cold. It was the kind of cold that burned the skin, made you draw your hand back from a flame only to realize the nerves were shocked to numbness. Then came the slow trickle of acid through my spine, leaking into my muscles and throat. It was viscous, eroding everything in its path.

Someone was screaming. I wanted to tell them to shut the fuck up. All around me, there was noise. A single movement made my ears ring as though a gun had gone off next to my ear. 

Then I realized it was me who was screaming. 

I was moved to a table and the sting of the contact brought tears to my eyes.

Well, it would have, if my body could produce any form of liquid. My eyes were squeezed shut, sobs coming from my throat. No spit, no sweat, no tears. I had no idea when the fuck dehydration had set in. I was a bag of dry ice. 

I started to tremble. No, that's an understatement. I was spasming. Violently. I felt myself roll of the table, limp and flopping and crying like a child. 

Arms caught me before I fell to the floor. I wanted to push them away, tell them to fuck off, to join me in hell. If they had let me drop, I would have hit my head and been unconscious. At least it would have ended the pain. 

I wondered briefly if it was death that had caught me.

I chanced a glance and peeled my eyes open. The lids were stuck together, and, after spending several moments thinking I'd gone blind, I ripped them open to blink frantically.

It took several seconds for my vision to clear.

And then I was drowning in a storm.


	4. Chapter 4

"It's ok. You're going to be fine."

I didn't recognize the person speaking to me, nor did I believe a word he said. He had no idea what I was going through. It was all bullshit lies that he was telling to me and especially to himself. He was keeping up appearances, keeping his voice level to reassure me that I was not actually going to die. But his eyes betrayed him. I kept staring straight into them, watching them flash between awe and fear. I wanted to speak but my throat felt as though it had been slit by knives. 

"Don't worry. Don't worry."

His voice was barely a whisper and I almost didn't hear him. As I kept shaking, the sound of the electrocardiogram frantically beeping filled my ears. There were shouts as well. Sounds of metal on metal and a woman crying. I wanted to scream at her, to tell her to get the fuck out of the room if she couldn't take it.

I tried. But all that came out was a weak moan.

Figures.

Then a new set of hands lifted me up and placed me back on the table. The shock of the steel caused my skin to sting. My eyes rolled back into my head and suddenly a sharp pain stabbed my left wrist. It felt as though my bones were shattering. 

"Drink this."

A foam cup was placed to my lips and my head was lifted to help the process along. My head jerked to the side twice, causing some of the liquid to spill on my neck. Experimentally, I tried to move my mouth, my head or my hands.

Nothing. 

I had no control of any part of my body, and I felt like a useless rag doll. A thumb pulled my chin down, opening my mouth, so I could drink and I felt the urge to vomit as soon as the liquid touched my tongue.

It comprised the consistency of syrup but it tasted like urine. My head was titled back and I began to gag as I attempted to swallow. Briefly, I wondered if this was how humans had evolved - into some backwards form of cannibalism where the bodily fluids were drank before they feasted on the meat. 

That was when the beeping became loud and urgent, and I recognized the pulse of the sound to be cardiac arrest. 

And then I passed out.

~~

My chest was the first thing to move. I felt it, even in the haze between wakefulness and sleep, lift itself from the bed - a bed! - before my eyes opened. I was vaulted, by the force of the contents of my stomach, over the side of the bed, and I choked out what small remnants of liquid were left inside me.

Again, nothing. I was left dry heaving helplessly. My left arm slumped over my body and dangled limply. I had no strength to move it. 

Momentarily the heaving subsided, and I took the opportunity to assess my situation. 

I remembered being awake, however short lived that little experiment had been, and feeling the agony of being alive. I knew I had passed out. I knew it was from over stimulation.

That was it. All in all: pretty fucking useless information.

I didn't know when I was - if I had made it to the 100 year mark or if I had been taken out early. I didn't know where I was. A quick glance with my bleary eyes informed me that this room was new, something that was built while I was asleep. 

And lastly: I didn't know why I was sick.

In every single test run, no side effect of vomit or nausea had been present. That is not to say every test subject is the same and that the leap from cows, who posses only a few strands of DNA that differ from ours, to humans was a small one. But we also have to consider: none of our test subjects were drug addicts.

Oh, my beautiful Necozine. So this is how we end our relationship. You, rotting for a century under a piece of wood, and me, sweating sick and yellow stains into the sterile sheets of the future.

Again I felt the waves of sickness roll from my stomach into my throat, and I heaved emptiness onto the white tiles. My spit and drool hung like strings from my bottom lip. What a disgusting creature I was. Sweat beaded and dripped down my face, though I hadn't remembered my skin ever feeling so clammy. 

Taking in a breath that rattled my lungs, I recognized something very different about the air around me. It was thick and heavy, the way you would imagine a summer heat would affect the weight of the wind. But it was cold. I furrowed my brow and breathed again. I was held in something of a stasis chamber, and I could sense chemicals in the atmosphere to maintain my body's equilibrium from the outside-in. 

Smart. The fuckers weren't entirely useless. 

My head began to throb, the effort of living too much for my weary synapses. I watched with morbid fascination as my middle finger twitched several times. With all the strength I could muster, I attempted to make a fist so I could stop the bastard from moving. 

Couldn't even ball my fingers. What the fuck kind of physical therapy was I going to need? I was worse than a baby. Maybe I was paralyzed. 

I started wishing for death when I noticed a black shadow in the corner of my eye. It assumed the vague shape of a human, though I wasn't sure. Unable to turn my head to look, I forced my eyes on the object but soon gave up when the act of focusing made me ill once more.

Heaving all my spit onto the tiles, I thought of what a wonderful show I was putting on for my small audience. Maybe I would shit the bed as the finale. 

The black figure remained for several minutes and, eventually, I my irritation got the best of me. Squeezing my eyes shut, I tried to find my voice for the first time in 100 years.

'Speak….motherfucker.' The sound of my voice made me wince. It was raspy and dry, a darker, rougher version of myself. I needed water.

'How are you feeling?'

The voice was magnified which lead me to believe the person was outside whatever walls I was contained in. I resented their question.

'I'm having…" I paused to gather my strength, my words. 'A fucking picnic.'

They ignored my comment completely.'You passed out in the middle of cardiac arrest. It's been three days since your initial awakening. You also sprained your left wrist.'

I hadn't even noticed the bandage on my wrist. This must have been the intense pain I felt during the awakening. Truthfully, it was a frightening thing to consider - that the force of my spasms was enough to cause my joints to tear. It was tightly bound and made of a fabric I had never seen before. I sighed. Another thing to add to the list of shit I had to deal with.

'Your muscles have atrophied a considerable amount, so don't be surprised if you have no motor control. 

I groaned in response as I regarded the pattern my saliva had made on the floor. While this did explain my considerable lack of strength, this did little to offer any vague sense of comfort.

'You're contained for now in the stasis chamber. You might remember this as the room in which you changed your clothes just before you underwent the freezing process. It's changed considerably in the last 100 years. It was developed approximately twenty years ago purely for your arrival.'

My own fucking cage. How quaint. 

After a moment's pause, they spoke again. 

'Is there anything we can get you?'

I snorted. It fucking hurt.

'Are you…….taking requests?' I had a fucking list the size of Jupiter….if Jupiter hadn't exploded in some kind of cosmic event, that is.

'What do you need?'

A new life. Death. A different body. Necozine. 'Water,' I said. 

Almost immediately I heard the sound of a door sliding open and footsteps softly walking towards me. The feet paused just below my sightline before hands grappled along my ribs and turned me onto my back to rest my head on the pillow. 

A young woman stove over me, smiling softly, a clear plastic object placed over her mouth and nose. I had never seen such a thing before, but I assumed it was for sanitation purposes rather than cosmetic. 

'Your immune system is very weak…' The voice continued, but I ignored it and studied the hair and neckline of the nurse above me. I watched the way her dark skin seemed to glow, the way she moved with ease. Beautiful. 

She placed the glass to my lips and I was pleased to taste real liquid instead of the synthetic abomination that had ingrained itself on my memory. I downed the whole glass, letting the moisture ease the ache of my scarred throat.

'Mr. Bellamy….we do have one more thing.' The voice shattered the peace I had only just found. 'There are…unidentifiable substances in your blood stream. We have no idea what they are or how long they've been there.'

Goddammit, Necozine, you just refuse to give up.

How could I tell them about a drug they had never heard of? How could I potentially ruin the experiment they had built their lives on? I decided not to say anything and allowed the nurse to wipe the cold sweat off my brow. 

I stared at the ceiling as she injected something into my right hand that made my vision start to spin.

'Was it you?' I asked.

'What?'

'Was it you who caught me?' I didn't know why the thought suddenly came to my mind.

'….Yes.'

I smiled.

'We will start therapy in a few days, once you've had a chance to rest.'

I smiled at nothing and no one, hoping I could sleep through the phases of my withdrawal. Instantly, I knew that it would be impossible. As I drifted off to sleep, I had the sudden realization that coming off Necozine was going to be more difficult that being resurrected.


	5. Chapter 5

I'd only been conscious for sixteen hours before everything went to shit. 

When I woke up after the nurse had tranquilized me, I was completely alone. It took thirty seconds for my eyes to focus so I could finally get my bearings, and I pressed my head into my pillow to fight off a dizzy spell. The place where I'd changed out of my clothes was now acting as my bedroom, though it had definitely been renovated and expanded in size. I made a mental note to congratulate whomever had designed the wall that monitored everything that was happening inside me. From blood pressure to brain function, everything was displayed in a unique color code. I'd be thoroughly disappointed if the guy was dead. I at least wanted to shake his hand.

Apart from a night stand next to my bed, there was nothing else in the room. Not even a chair. Apparently, people of the future weren't very big on decorating. They also really fucking loved white. If I was a morbid son-of-a-bitch, I would have cut my hand to put a little red in the room. You know, brighten up the place.

I desperately wanted to move but everything about myself, right down to my bones, felt too heavy. I was positive I had little to no muscle strength. There was a lengthy pause between the beeps of my heart monitor, as though my blood had turned to liquid steel and my heart wasn't strong enough to pump it through. Even my lungs couldn't hold oxygen for very long without feeling lie they were ripping. My body was learning how to be alive.

A pretty young woman, the same who had brought me the water, came in to chart my progress. She was dressed in white scrubs, a purple fabric belt tied around her waist. Her red hair was an alarming and welcome flush of colour. I wanted to speak to her but my throat was dangerously dry. All I could do was lay there, on my back, relatively helpless. I didn't even have the strength to wave.

"My name is Ana," she said, not looking up from the tablet in her hand. "Don't try to speak. The little fiasco yesterday practically tore your vocal cords. Your body is trying to catch up in its healing." 

She paused, glancing over to regard my expression. I scowled.

"I know it's shit." She finished writing and turned her eyes to me, offering a sigh of understanding. The fact that she didn't sugar coat anything made me like her. "You have to bear with us for a bit. Anything you think you can do, don't. You're smart, obviously, but the fact that you're even breathing will make you do something stupid. I'd like to see you live beyond the twenty-four hour mark. After that, you'll kind of be immortal. I like a guy who lives forever." 

She winked at me, but nothing about the action was flirting. Her straight humor led me to manage a grim smile. I liked that she was doing her job, that she told me what I needed to know without acting like I was an idiot. She respected me, and I immediately respected her.

An endless rotating cast of characters came to visit and marvel at me like I was an animal in some kind of mechanical zoo. Part of me nearly ignored Ana's request to remain silent just so I could shout for them to leave, but the thought of following through with the plan made my throat burn in apprehension.

I don't know how long I sat there, bored as fuck and watching the lines of my EKG flash up and down. Small talk was out of the question for two reasons. First, I couldn't fucking speak, so that put the damper on that shit. And second, I entered their present lacking one hundred years worth of information, so, even if I could speak, who would really give a shit about what I had to say? I ignored the fact that my mysterious shadow person hadn't made himself known. In fact, I kind of liked it. His absence proved that he treated me like someone who needed time to heal instead of a laboratory success. 

A small group of men entered the room at the fifteen hour mark, with Ana in tow looking exasperated. They were all wearing suits, and I didn't need to be one of their contemporaries to know that the fabric was expensive. These were men who handled the money; government folk who sat behind desks all day instead of make worthwhile discoveries. They were coming into my room to celebrate their success. In truth, they were celebrating the fact that I wasn't dead. 

The champagne was popped right in front of my face. They poured it into plastic cups before one of them, the tallest one with a receding hairline, said a brief toast. I watched him closely and waited to see if would he turn to look at me, the very subject of his toast. He never did. Briefly, I toyed with the idea that this celebration would still have occurred even if something had gone horribly wrong. If I had gone deaf, dumb and blind; if I had remained unconscious, they would still be in the room, cheering each other on like they were at a fucking football match. 'The vegetable has a pulse! Fucking hurray!'

Assholes.

Ana stood behind them for five minutes, not taking part in the celebration. Clearly pissed off, she watched their every move until she decided she'd had enough.

"Gentlemen, there is a pub not a ten minute drive from here if you would like to continue....whatever this is. As it happens, this is still a science facility so I am going to ask you to relocate. I have work to do."

Maybe it was because I was battling unprecedented exhaustion, or maybe it was because Ana was simply a remarkable woman, but in the aftermath of her words I contemplated proposing marriage to her when I regained my ability to speak.

"This is a victory for you as well, Ana." One of the Three-Piece-Suits offered her a glass of champagne.

She remained unimpressed. "I will not be consuming alcohol while I am working, thank you. Mr. Anders, I am asking you nicely to remove your party from this room. If you continue to resist, I will call Mr. Howard and he will remove you himself."

Another of the Suits, one whose face looked like dough, snorted into his cup. "He's hardly intimidating."

I wanted to keep listening, curious as to who this Howard guy was and why he was so low on the food chain, but my whole body started to shake. It was nothing like the bone breaking convulsions of my initial awakening, merely chills that were rippling down my spine even though I found the temperature to be quite comfortable. My heart rate kicked up a few notches and I recognized these symptoms as an anxiety attack. Instead of making me fear for my life, the trembling in my arms and legs simply made me mildly irritated. I watched in fascination as my hand started to twitch, small trembles that made my fingers move as though they were pulling a trigger.

Sweat started to collect at my hairline, gliding down my forehead and into my eyes. Still, I assumed this was a panic attack or something similar. My organs were still coming to terms with the fact that they were being required to work, and it was plausible that my pituitary and adrenal gland were overcompensating. While those things should not be overlooked, I considered myself to be pretty fucking healthy.

Over their now heated conversation, Ana heard the sounds of my accelerated heart rate and studied the wall monitor before abruptly turning her attention back to the Suits.

"Leave." Her voice was cold.

"Is that how you talk to your superiors, Miss Breton?" Receding Hairline fixed her with a stern gaze.

"It is when one of the most significant scientific events in world history is placed in jeopardy. Leave. I will not ask you again."

The men glared at her as they turned toward the door. Ana held her ground, arms crossed and a stern grimace. 

"And it's Mrs. Breton," she said as Receding Hairline made it to the door.

He turned back to scowl just has the glass door slid shut.

My heart sank. Marriage was out of the question.

"Sorry about that," she said, walking over to me.

For being married?

"You're not actually in jeopardy. I just said that to get them the hell out."

Oh.

Her eyes narrowed as she checked my condition. She placed a hand on my forehead only for it to come away damp. If she was distressed, she did a fucking impressive job of hiding it. 

"I'll be honest," she began, moving to the wall monitor. "I'm having a hell of a time figuring out what is a side effect, what is natural, and what is caused by the foreign particles we found. Seriously, I have never seen anything like them." She turned to look back at me then. Her face was coated with concern, and that's when I started to worry. 

My vision blurred momentarily, distorting my surroundings and giving me a sharp headache. When the fog disappeared, Ana was standing above me injecting a syringe into my arm.

"This should regulate your heart, but until we can figure out what the hell is in your bloodstream it's going to be hit or miss." 

A wave of exhaustion rolled over me and my eyes began to droop. My sense of time became detached from reality. In a daze, I watched Ana stroke the wall, inputting codes and numbers I would only ever be so lucky to understand. I wanted to scream at her. I knew exactly what was in my blood. If only I could speak, I would have explained it all in great detail. If I had strength, I would have written the exact formula.

I could do neither of those things. So, instead, I remained silent as Ana slipped out the door and I drifted into hell.

~~

Necozine is, if nothing else, a cocktail. And, like all cocktails, there is a specific and calculated amount of each ingredient that is added. Above all, it is a semisynthetic drug that acts as an empathogen-entactogen as it releases serotonin in the brain. However, unlike typical psychedelics like MDMA and LSD, it contains a higher tryptamine compound that offers the affects of synesthesia. If this cocktail had stopped there, it is likely there would be little to no way for a subject to become addicted. If they did, it would be from the lack of increased serotonin, which would affect mood, and the symptoms of withdrawal would cease within a week. In order for Necozine to chemically combine, it contains traces of methylphenpropane and opioid diacetate. This is what made Necozine work so well.

As a chemist, I get a bigger hard on over this information than you do.

All you really need to know is this: it was the traces of meth that made Necozine addictive.

All I needed to know was: it was the traces of meth that made the psychosomatic withdrawal symptoms utterly fucking terrifying.

~~

Something was watching me. 

I knew I hadn't slept for very long, my mind still hazy with half sleep and drugs. It was the uncanny sensation that something was standing above the foot of my bed that made my body prevent itself from falling deep into relaxation. My skin started to crawl and unease flooded my system. 

The intruder was not monitoring my sleep patterns. It was not Ana, whose presence probably would have comforted me. Whomever, or whatever, was watching me wanted to cause me harm.

But not yet.

Even with my eyes closed, I could tell that they were going to prolong their attack and spend their time feasting on my paranoia. 

I forced myself to remain quiet, silencing effort of my breathing for as long as possible before it became painful. In those few quiet moments, I heard the barely discernible wheeze of another being taking in air. 

Slowly.

Softly.

Breathing in union with me. Looming above me.

My eyes flew open, adjusting to the darkness with impressive speed. I immediately wished I had been blind.

A dark figure stood above me. Too tall to be human, to angular to be anything else. It was a shadow that seemed bleed into my surroundings. I could tell it was smiling. I wished it would fucking stop.

A spike in my heart rate at this realization gave me away, the increased speed of the beeps signaling that I was conscious of my surroundings. It knew I was awake. It knew I was aware of its presence. It knew I expected an attack. 

So why would it wait?

It did not, as I expected tear my flesh from my bones. Instead, it opened it's mouth to reveal teeth, too many teeth. Daggers floating in space. It released a high pitched static scream that filled my ears and made them ring. It was an onslaught of sensation, with the pitch and volume of a from a broken radio station. My eyes rolled back into my head and I started gasping for breath, the synapses in my brain going haywire. A headache formed in my frontal lobes, creating a pressure unlike anything I had ever experienced, drilling itself into every core of my mind. The thought of my cranium breaking from the strain did not seem too farfetched.

As quickly as it came, it was over. I was alone in my room once more and as I gasped for air I felt the trickle of liquid from my ear and down my neck. I didn't have the strength to wipe it away, so I remained on my back for the rest of the night as I bled into my pillow. 

That was only the beginning. 

~~

I hadn't slept the whole night. Every attempt I'd made during the day proved futile, as there was too much stimulation between the lights and the sounds and the people checking my progress. In the afternoon, Ana came in with a cup of liquid that looked teal. She moved my bed to a sitting position and ran a hand through my hair. I smiled at the touch. 

"Today," she said, with a tone of apprehension in her voice, "we are going to try to have you speak. All you have to do is be brave and drink this. I know what you're thinking. You froze yourself for a hundred years, you can tackle anything. Well, let me tell you buddy." She turned my head so I could look at her. "I'm always honest with you, with all my patients. And when I say this tastes like piss, I mean it."

I scowled. If it was the fucking synthetic pee again, I was going to break the nose of the guy who invented it the minute I could move again.

She pressed the cup to my lips, and I made a vague groan.

Really?

"Come on. I know you've got balls. Prove to me your bravery wasn't just stupidity."

Fuck you, Ana. 

She tipped the cup carefully, and once again I let the liquid into my mouth against my better judgement. I almost spat it out, but Ana tipped the cup further, forcing me to swallow. I squeezed my eyes shut, skin forming crinkles at the sides. It tasted more like cat piss than it had before. I struggled through the entire portion and gasped for breath when it was done.

"You are a fucking hero, you hear me?" Ana threw the cup away and turned to the wall, turning her hand in a circular motion which made a timer appear on the wall for one minute. "When this beeps, you're going to try to say something to me. This drink is a combination of sugar, water and paracetachormal."

I simply stared at her, not taking her nonsense. What the fuck was that? It wasn't even a real thing.

"This was invented twelve years ago by our very own Doctor Howard. It will help rebuild the muscles in your trachea."

There was that name again. Doctor Howard. At every turn, this name grew more and more fascinating, though why the fucker hadn't shown himself was starting to irritate me.

"I don't want you to hate me, but you will have to drink this every single day until the corniculate and cuneiform cartilage are fully rebuilt. For some reason, those parts of your vocal chords suffered the most damage. That will take about four days, I'm sorry we can't make it any faster."

I cringed at the thought of going through this every single day, but I was loathe to admit that the fire in my chest had subsided minutely. The timer went off, and I watched the way she turned her hand in the opposite direction, turning her hazel eyes back to me.

"Ok. Talk to me, Matthew. I'm eager to meet you."

I ran through my head all the witty things I could try to say, and none of them made any kind of sense when condensed to one word. Because, fuck you, that was all I had the confidence to manage. I turned my head and felt the pull of my skin under the caked blood of my ear. Oh. Yeah. I probably should have told her about that, though how she hadn't noticed before was disconcerting. 

I shut my eyes and gathered as much strength into my chest as I possibly could, hoping to Christ I wouldn't bite my tongue in the process.

"Buh." Was all I managed. How fucking anti-climactic.

Ana smiled. "Try again."

"Blo-" I gasped. Fuck, this hurt. Even moving my mouth was exhausting. "Blood."

I threw the word into the atmosphere and, even though it was a morbid thing to say, I smiled. The sound of my own voice, when it wasn't screaming in terror, was a welcome sound.

Ana, however, was no where near as pleased. "What?" Her voice had gone cold.

"Blood," I said again. This time it was easier. I tried to tell her where. "E-ear." I panted. I smiled at my success.

She rushed over to my bed and turned my head to inspect my ear. I felt her hands along my skin and my flesh tingled at the contact. 

"Pillow." The pain in my chest with each word gradually decreased, and I felt fucking giddy.

Ana pulled my pillow out from under my head and stared at me dubiously. I smiled. Good girl. She looked too concerned to focus on the fact that I had just said three words, one of which had two syllables. I wanted fucking confetti, I wanted a goddamn parade. She held the pillow up, and all the blood rushed from my face.

There was no blood on it at all.

That scared the fuck out of me. I'd spent hours feeling the blood pool onto the sheets and cake onto my skin. My flesh had itched in irritation the entire night, but when Ana held up my pristine pillow I started to wonder if the entire thing, from the shadow to the screaming noise, had been a vivid nightmare. 

"I think….that's enough speaking practice for today," she said cautiously. I had never heard anyone sound so terrified.

Ana changed my pillowcase anyway, saying it due for a wash, but I could tell she was more concerned for my psychological wellbeing than the hygiene of my bedsheets. It didn't go unnoticed that she kept a close eye on me throughout the entire day. Too close to the wall, too close to my bed frame, I could tell she was worried. There was a glint in her eye I didn't like when she charted my progress; the way her eyes narrowed made me uneasy.

Like an idiot, I shrugged these feelings off. I was certain I'd had a visceral nightmare, the kind that makes you think that reality has collapsed around you. Typically, these types of nightmares don't reoccur. Nigh terrors only occur once every month, if that. Occasionally the variables change depending on stress. Even though my body was under a very different level of stress, there was no reason my sleep patterns should be any different. If anything, my body would have been more capable to fall into REM cycles due to exhaustion.

When it was time for Ana to go home, she was hesitant to leave. I stupidly convinced her I'd be fine with a noncommittal shrug of my shoulders.

Why should I be ruled by nightmare? I'm a big fucking boy, I was certain I could take it.

It was only when the lights were turned off that I realized how fucking wrong I was.

I spent three damn hours scouring every corner of my wall for my intruder, though in the back of my mind I knew he wouldn't show so long as I expected him. That was the thing. I had assigned 'it' a gender because it felt too masculine, too much like me to have a vagina. Besides, what I knew of female phantasms was they were fairly in your face and out for revenge. This guy was just psychotic and got off on my fear.

I lost precious hours of sleep waiting for him to come, but he never did. When I started to drift, the sweat began to pour down my face. It streaked lines across my skin, and the sweat from my upper lip dripped from my cupid's bow in between my closed lips. It leaked slowly on to my tongue and I could taste my own anxiety. That was when I was shocked back to reality by the sensation of a holy wound tearing its way through my thigh. I didn't need the use of my fingers to know that a gaping hole was forming, the flesh folding back as though it were being pulled and flayed in each direction. 

The sounds of my screaming began to fill the room, though I didn't know when I had started to yell. My vision was blurring to whiteness from the pain, and I knew exactly what was happening. 

The frequency of my Necozine injections was coming back to bite me in the ass. My prized injection spot was starting to decay, growing gangrenous and toxic. I wondered how long I had before the sepsis would kick in. How long before it would reach my dick and start to rot before my eyes. The thought made me feel ill. The blood from my leg dripped in streams, making thick, slippery pools on the sheets. I couldn't move my leg to alleviate the sensation.

My breath caught when I felt insects crawling up my leg. An army of spiders was making its way along my limbs, only to burrow in the hole that had only just appeared. Fuck the sepsis, this was a bit more urgent.

Thousands of the fuckers were burrowing into my skin, and I clenched my teeth together to wheeze my apprehension. I wanted to kick them off, kill them, roll out of the bed and crush them under my weight. Heaving my chest off the bed, seized with panic, only once took all the strength I could muster, and I collapsed onto the mattress once more. Tears formed in my eyes, and the idea of spiders residing in me made me ill.

I vomited on myself in fear.

The lights in the room came on, forcing me to squint with the sudden blow. A young man, no more than my age, came running in, the coat tails of his lab coat flapping behind him.

"What the fuck is going on?" 

He was muttering to himself, just as panicked as I, and asking the only question I cared to ask. In his demeanor, I saw confusion and panic. He was reading every single number and line about my body with great care, running his hand along the glass as though he were caressing a lover.

"What the bloody hell….is any of this."

He rounded on me, and suddenly, I knew him. The one who caught me, the one with the grey eyes. My shadow person. Warily, he approached my bed, kindness forming in his irises as he did his best to smile at me.

"Matthew, my name is Doctor Howard." How fucking ceremonious was this meeting. I was trilling with excitement, which made me vomit once more due to the sudden shift in my emotional state.

He tilted my head and swiftly grabbed a steel bowl for me to vomit in, utterly unscathed my the whole ordeal. 

He continued to speak.

"I am the lead scientist on your case. While I wish terribly that meant I could be here with you, monitoring your progress, my title merely means more paperwork than I ever fucking cared to look at in my life."

I laughed in understanding, against my better judgement, and the breeze caused the vomit on my bottom lip to fly. 

"Ugh," I moaned.

"Eh, no big deal." He waved a hand, not bothering to look in my spray's direction. "What is a big deal, is your neurological pattern. Something is dragging you deep into psychosis. Would you, the person who invented this process, be able to offer some insight? I'm told Ana started you on the paracetachormal."

I nodded, slowly, narrowing my eyes and immediately filling with panic. This fucking cunt. What did he want from me? Was he too lazy to do his own research on the project? Did I need to be responsible for everything? My mood swung from joy to rage back to panic, and I started to tremble once again. My brain was being overloaded with information: too much light, too much fear, too much hatred for this idiot scientist. I knew it wasn't his fault, that he wasn't responsible for the Necozine, but pointing the finger at something made the rage ebb just a little.

I weighed my options. Tell him his prized subject was a fucking junkie and get a cure, while also getting strapped with malpractice in my own project in the process or suffer in silence and try to fucking live. I went in the complete opposite direction and decided to tell him that I was now a husk made of spiders.

"Spiders." I whispered, a wicked grin forming my face.

Howard looked taken aback, his hands resting on the arms of my hospital bed - that looked too much like a skeleton - before blinking twice. "What?"

"Spiddeerrrssss." I repeated, with a hiss. And then I laughed. The nonsense of it felt delicious.

"Matthew, where do you see spiders?"

"Bed." I laughed again. "Bed, with me."

Howard ripped my sheet off my body, and we both stared in horror at my thigh.

No wound.

No spiders.

I looked back up at Howard, only briefly, before I vomited down my chest and collapsed in exhaustion.

Fucking Necozine.


	6. Chapter 6

I was starting to confuse the sound of my heartbeat with the computerized clicks of the monitors throughout my room. When I felt myself drifting back to reality, the first thing I became aware of was how pleasantly even the rhythm was. I waited for the overwhelming flood of adrenaline to send me plummeting back into fear, but when it didn't come I knew I'd been heavily sedated. My body felt heavy and limp, and I knew I'd been given a friendly concoction of drugs to keep me still after my colourful outburst. Tentatively, I mustered the strength to flex my wrists, testing for leather straps in case the drugs wore off too soon. There were none. I had to remind myself that this wasn't a hospital, just a research facility, even though I felt less like a scientist and more like patient zero with each passing hour. 

Visions of the seeping wound inside my thigh returned before I remembered that this had all been a lie and that, no, there weren't actually spiders under my skin even though that would have made things a bit more interesting, if not horrific. Begrudgingly, I pulled my eyes apart only to swiftly drown in blinding white light that made my right temple throb like it had been shot. I shut them again, and slowly felt the numbness of my limbs give way to needles and tubes running along the whole of me. My body had become a sponge, pumped full with liquids to keep me hydrated, fed, sedated and, probably, sane. 

'You're awake. Good.' 

I recognized the voice, having spent a great deal of time with it, though my brief meeting with it's owner the night before had been muddled with terror and a lack of clarity. Somehow, I found the strength to look at him through half-lidded eyes. I hoped it looked like I gave a shit about anything he wanted to tell me.

'You're under heavy sedation so you can't move. I wish we didn't have to, but it's a safety precaution that has mutual benefit.'

I figured as much.

'There are sixteen tubes connected to various muscles and pressure points of your body, each with different functions. Some are rebuilding muscle mass, others are draining toxins. When you do regain your strength, I am asking you nicely not to pull them out. It will hurt.'

That got my attention. Perhaps what struck me more was that, the night before, he had been completely pleasant and gentle in the way he had handled me. But now, well, Howard was cold and bitter. The word 'nice' was stripped of its meaning, and I didn't want to know what the alternative was. He sounded entirely put out.

I opened my eyes a bit wider, hoping to find his black silhouette in the staggering glow. He saved me the trouble by approaching my bed and gazing down at me, gray eyes storming. Briefly, I noted that even with bags under his eyes, his jaw firm and his brow furrowed, he was a pretty fucker. I wanted to smile. He and I were one and the same, young hotshots who spent the best years of their lives in lab coats and rarely seeing natural light. But my skin felt tight, so instead I just stared at him and waited for him to continue speaking.

'My favourite of these tubes is the one connected deep into your trachea.'

My eyes bugged wide. That was fucking unexpected. 

'Since you've been given paracetachormal, we are going to continue the treatment by directly attaching it to your vocal chords. We would prefer to have you drink it, but this method cuts around 20 hours of the healing process. I know it's not ideal, but this also has mutual benefit. Know why?'

Bastard knew I wouldn't be able to respond, so I just scowled at him. 

'Because there are some interesting particles floating around your bloodstream, particles that shouldn't even have combined and could only get there unless they were injected. I'm very eager to hear you explain why there are traces of meth kicking around your system. Very. Eager.' 

He knew. They all knew and I was completely fucked. The sedatives stopped me from feeling the anxiety I should have felt, but didn't stop me from noticing the way Howard smirked with pleasure. I was almost positive he was the one who shoved the tube into my throat just to prove who was in control. And the sick thing was that I couldn't even hate him for it, because I'd have done the same. In reality, that's all scientists were. Grown men with control issues, tinkering with the universe just to show we could harness cosmic power and prove we meant something.

Or maybe that was just me. 

'We are slowly draining the meth from your system, but it will take time to filter. Unfortunately, I can't give you a timeframe for when you will be better. Most of your symptoms appear to by psychosomatic and the best way for those to heal is through time. Sometimes the best medicine is rest.' 

I wanted to call him on his bullshit. He knew I'd jeopardized the project, that the small bits of left over Necozine were dangerously close to making both of our life's work utterly useless. And just like he knew those things, I knew he wasn't saintly enough to take me out of the fire so quickly. He wanted me to suffer because I deserved it.

He pressed his lips into a thin line before he pushed away from my bed, and once again I was swamped in light that made my head throb. I shut my eyes, and was grateful that, in the absence of sight, my hearing overcompensated for the sensory loss. 

To the right of me, I heard a woman stop Howard before he left the room. They were speaking quietly, but I recognized her voice as Ana's and I strained to listen to their conversation. 

'How is he doing?' She sounded concerned and I was grateful that I at least had one ally.

'He's going to be fine, just make sure you keep pumping 10 cc's of paracetachormal every hour. At this rate he should have full vocal function in about eighteen hours.' I heard something in his hands clicking, and I desperately wanted to know if it was a watch or another machine they wanted to use on me. 

'And the hallucinations?' 

He hesitated. 'If he has another, give him 15 cc's of amisulpride and that should last him eight hours.' 

So. He really wasn't going to let me suffer. Whether he left me in the fire or not didn't matter, I just wanted to know if he would be true to his word. I trusted him even less now that I knew he wasn't. 

'What about you?' Ana sounded more concerned for Howard than for me, and I was at once confused and pissed, considering I was the one trapped in an acupuncturist's nightmare. 

'What about me?'

'You know what I mean. I told you that you were walking a thin line. When we first started, I said you were getting too attached.'

'Oh come on, Ana. We grew up learning about him! Generations of people knew his name, his life, and what he's done for science, and we get to meet him. I mean, we start out as kids knowing there's someone who came before us, with a past as important as ours, that he gave up for the benefit of the future and this is it? A drug addict in need of an attitude adjustment?'

If I could have, I would have cringed at the accusation. I could hear his coat moving and knew he was gesticulating frantically in his frustration. 

He sighed. ' I don't care that our first conversation was dripping with sarcasm on his end, or that, during our second, he threw up on me and was convinced his leg was in a state of decay. I care that he somehow tricked all of us into thinking he was a hero.'

'Dom,' Ana said, gently. It was the first time I had heard him called by a nickname. No Doctor, no last time. It sounded nice, like sunshine. 'He didn't trick anyone. You have spent your entire career reading his notes, reading Dr. Ronson's preparations with him. You have this fantasy and I warned you that you might be disappointed.'

It sounded so familiar. I'd heard it before, but I couldn't remember where or when, or if the voices were the same. I wanted to shout at Ana to say it again so I could remember, but she carried on.

'Look, he's alive and we can fix him. This wasn't a failure, we just have some setbacks. We knew from the start we had the harder job, that pulling him out and making him better would be more difficult than putting him under. But you need to let go of whatever it is you're holding on to and realize that if he was reckless enough to freeze himself for 100 years, then he was certainly reckless enough to be a user.'

I wasn't entirely sure what a 'user' meant, but I assumed that it was a slang term for a drug addict like me. Ana had offered Howard a clear perspective that argued in favor of my humanity, but Howard himself had brought up some things I hadn't thought about since before I went under.

Being frozen for 100 years meant the scientific world had been talking about me even when I was no longer engaged with the conversation. Being the first person to do this meant that I had stopped being a person and had become an event. The traits of my personality had been erased in favor of my name (which was just words), my history (which were words and more words of people and places that might no longer exist), and the thing that I had done. Because was a distant object of nothingness, I had become fiction, and, because I was fiction, the world I was waking up in had invented a past life for me. 

From what Ana was saying, it sounded like Howard had invested a lot of time in creating a world for me. In fact, it sounded like she was hinting that he was definitely too invested. It seemed almost too easy, all the ways I could play this to my advantage, it was like I was lucky. The reality was that I would have to be careful with the words that I chose when I could speak again, and it was for this reason it was a good thing Howard didn't know me at all.

I fell asleep listening to them discuss the medicine I would need over the next few days and the therapy I would undergo when my muscles were strong enough to support my weight. In the physical chaos of my body's struggle to live, I had forgotten I would undergo months of therapy to ensure I suffered no memory loss, and preparations for assimilation. It was a long and boring haul that meant nothing but more distress on my part, so I let the drugs nurse me into relaxation. Before I drifted to sleep I made a mental note to find a way to convince Howard to give me my stash of Necozine underneath the floor. 

Yes, I was alive and I was going to live. But that didn't mean I needed to wipe the Earth of all its colours.

~~

Twenty-four hours later I found myself being propped up in bed with Ana and Howard standing to the left of me. It was the first time I got a good look at my body and I felt like a squid with too many appendages. 

Ana stepped towards me and placed a warm cloth underneath the tube in my throat. She offered me a sympathetic smile before clutching the tube with steady hands.

'This cloth is soaked with an anesthetic. When I pull this out, the removal won't hurt, but until I seal off the entry point it will hurt to breathe. I need you to remain calm when this happens.'

I nodded meekly, though I knew that if a scientist was telling me I would feel pain then I needed to brace myself for what was to come. 

She tugged the tube back and I drew my eyes to the ceiling as I waited for it to be over. The tube seemed to continue on forever, as though it had been buried within the pit of my stomach, and felt like a ventricle was being removed from my numbed heart. As soon as it was out, air hit my windpipe and I naturally started to breathe. It was the worst mistake I ever made. Air and liquid became trapped in my lungs, and I coughed violently to clear it out. With each thrust of my chest, I felt liquid spill from the hole. Initially I thought this was blood, but when I looked down I found I was not dripping with red merely soaked in a clear wetness that burned to the touch.

'It's a chemical that cauterizes wounds,' Ana said as she tipped my head back. I peered over my nose at her as she loomed over me, pointing what looked to be a laser right at my neck. 'It sterilizes the cut and lets me seal this without using stitches.'

The beam of the laser felt like I was being lit on fire, but I could feel my skin sealing itself shut. Air that had been trapped in my windpipe began to circulate my body as normal and, when Ana pulled away, I ran my hands under my chin and along my neck. I felt whole again. 

The laser was drawn out of Ana's hand by an unseen mechanism and she reached behind her to grab a glass off a metal table.

'Drink this,' she said. 

The last time she told me to drink, I felt like I was drinking cat piss. I grimaced at her. 

'No,' she chuckled. 'This time, I promise it's just water.' 

Wearily, I took the glass and brought it to my nose. I smelled nothing. Slowly, I took sips and felt a fire in my chest I hadn't known was burning get extinguished. I drank the rest of the glass in large gulps. When she took the glass from my hand, she nodded to Howard before leaving the room.

He approached the bed and looked down the the floor before pulling his hand into the air, palm down. He then sat next to the bed, and I leaned over to see that he had somehow created a chair out of an electric grid on the floor.

'Cool, isn't it? I designed this when I was seventeen.' 

I brought my attention back to him and studied him. He looked to be about the same age as me, even though I was his senior by a mile. He looked tired but the lines on his face weren't drawn on by exhaustion or stress, they seemed too optimistic. It was his eyes, however, that were sharp, restless and hungry. For what, I wasn't sure but I imagined it was information about me.

'So,' he said cooly. 'Let's try this again. I'm Dom Howard. And you are?'

I remained silent. All the times I had spoken before had ended in vomit or a pain akin to swallowing knives.

'Go on,' he encouraged.

I wanted to tell him to fuck off, but I remembered I needed to be careful with my words if I wanted this to go my way.

'Bellamy,' I said, slowly. 'Matt Bellamy.' 

There's a relief that no one talks about when it comes to speaking. The first, is the sound of your own voice, unblemished and without screams of terror. The second, is the sound of your own name said in your own voice. When you haven't heard these things in days, or years, you lose a piece of your sanity that can only be returned once you do. To say I felt like I could have cried with glee was an understatement. 

'Excellent.' Howard smiled brightly, and for a moment I thought this conversation was going to focus on my readjustment to reality. But his eyes turned dark within an instant, and his right arm swished quickly through the air. 

A large, three dimensional image of a chemical compound formed in thin air, hovering gently next to him. I recognized it immediately as Necozine.

'What is this?' he asked, pointedly.

I smiled. That felt nice. 

'You know what it is.' It was a risk to play cheeky, one that felt good to play. 

'You're right, I do,' he said. I almost laughed at how well matched his attitude was with mine. 'I know that this,' he pointed to the left of the diagram, 'is diethylamide, and that this here is tryptamine bound with opioid diaceteate. And I know that this,' his hand sharply pointed to the last section, 'is methylphenpropane. I know what all this is, and I'd like to hear you say it.'

'It's a drug. Surely, a better question is what is it called?'

He barely even hesitated after I finished the sentence. 'Ok, what the fuck is it called?'

Oh. I liked him.

'It's called Necozine,' I said calmly. I saw pieces of myself in him and I could almost read the ways he rose to the top of this project at such a young age. I smiled despite myself, as it was my turn to change Howard into fiction. 

'Who invented it?' 

'No one invented it, really.'

'Don't play smart with me,' he said, dryly.

'No one invented it,' I continued, 'because it was an accident.'

'Whose accident was it?'

'Technically, that doesn't really matter because they are dead. Formally, however….it's ours.' I smirked, watching the pieces fit together behind Howard's eyes.

'What do you mean by "ours?"'

'I mean the ISH,' I said plainly.

He narrowed his eyes at me, working out the kinks of what I was telling him. 

'Why don't I know about it?'

'Because, in my day,' I laughed as soon as the words came out of my mouth. I was 28 years old but 100 years older than one of my peers. It was a surreal experience. 'Back when the accident happened, the company didn't want anyone to know that we had invented a second drug based on our tampering with already illegal substances. So we locked it away and destroyed the formula.'

'Then how do you still have this lingering you?'

I smirked. 'I have friends in the right places.'

He crossed his arms and leaned back. 'Ok. So how long have you been using?'

'Since before you were born.' I liked being able to say shit like that, but he remained utterly unimpressed. 'Eight months.'

'And addicted?'

'Seven.'

'Fantastic.'

This is where the conversation was going to get tough. I needed to convince him it was worth while to bring my Necozine back, I needed to find a way to make him go looking for it. I decided doing this in the name of science would be enough for him.

'I can help you find some if you're interested in studying it,' I tried, keeping my voice calm and even.

He cocked one eyebrow at me. 'Oh?' 

'I'm assuming because you're the lead scientist that you are living in my house, are you not?'

'Yes. Am I to assume that you have the formula just lying around a place I've spent the last four years in? Trust me, I would have noticed.'

'No, don't be ridiculous, I told you it was destroyed. And the people who had it memorized are dead.'

'How tragic.'

He had a point. It really was tragic. The last bits of Necozine I had were the only samples in existence, and I here I was throwing them on the frontline and offering them to someone who might destroy them completely. How fucking heartbreaking.

'Well, don't get too broken up about it,' I said, for my own benefit. 'I can do you one better.'

He just stared at me.

'That house you've been living in? That room you wake up in every morning? Well, you've been living over a case of ready to use Necozine for the past four years of your life.'

His face went white, eyes morphing from casual disinterest to full attention.

Oh yes. I had him right where I wanted him.


	7. Chapter 7

Howard had one of those expressive faces, the kind that could cycle through six emotions before settling on how he actually felt. It was entertaining watching the lines of his face morph, my own goddamn private show, before anger sat pretty on his features. Eyes narrowed to size me up, he pursed his lips like he was ready to scold me and it took every ounce of my willpower not to blow him a soft kiss. I had to remember that he was smart and he was hungry - that was the most important thing, the hunger. It was easy to recognize in him because I felt it too, constantly. 

There’s a recklessness that lives in every scientist, a sort of borderline personality disorder that forces them to rethink the world and break the realms of possibility beneath their fingers. This is what makes science innovative - the casual disregard of limits, the risk. There is no development, no discovery, no future without risk and we are the ones that create, and ignore, the risk on a regular basis for the sake of knowledge and, of course, power. Howard lived and bred this disorder in his blood; it was painfully obvious as he regarded me with a rage that was trapped between awe and disdain, and it was my job to keep his beast at bay so that mine would be the victor.

‘I see what you’re doing,’ he said, flatly.

‘What am I doing?’ I returned the sentiment with the same speed and tone, relishing that my tongue could keep with his pace.

‘You want me to go looking for it, to bring it right to you.’

He was good. Absolutely brilliant, and even though I wanted to kill him his perception made me want to fuck him. 

‘I said nothing of the sort.’ I kept my voice even and calm, watching him with more than a casual interest. Everything about him was different from what I expected, and this made everything infinitely more exciting. 

‘No, but that’s the game you want to play.’ 

‘I don’t recall my health being a game. If that’s what you want to imply -’

‘Physically, you’re fine,’ he said, quickly cutting me off. ‘This has nothing to do with your health.’

‘And mental health means nothing to you?’ I scowled at him, wondering how far he would push the risk. 

‘You’ll be fine.’

‘So you’re telling me you don’t want to study Necozine?’ It was easy to give my voice the air of nonchalance, to change its tone and cadence. There was an overwhelming sense of normalcy to the patterns of my speech and suddenly I felt human again, that I was no longer defective. I was not broken, I was alive.

His hand waved through the air in frustration, his mouth curling at its edges as though he wanted to laugh. ‘I don’t even believe that it’s in the house. It’s too simple, too obvious.’ 

I snorted and then grimaced. The back of my throat still burned from the chemicals ‘Apparently not, since we’ve gone 100 fucking years without anyone finding it.’

‘So what, you slept with it under your bed in case you needed an emergency fix?’

‘I slept with it under my bed because it seemed like the ideal place to hide it. I don’t need to keep playing verbal hardball with you to convince you to look for it. You’re already going to do it.’

He raised his eyebrows at me in sarcasm. ‘Am I?’

‘Of course you are.’

‘Oh?’

It was my turn to narrow my eyes, only slightly. ‘If you’re half the scientist this company thinks you are, half the scientist you think you are, there’s no way you’re going to let answers go unfounded.’ 

It didn’t matter that he thought I was a junkie, that he thought I was reckless - the very foundation of his self-definition was built on the fact that he believed in truth. Observation, justification, clarification, these are all just words that act as the mechanics of a scientist’s brain. Howard had his wheels turning long before he came into the room to scold me, and I had his attention from the moment he saw the results of my blood work. Like any good scientist, the drive to understand absolutely everything was itching under his fingers. 

The beeping of the machines around us became the soundtrack to his contemplation, and I took the opportunity to speak because the goddamn noise was getting irritating. 

‘We’re too similar, you and I.’ It was a truth that shocked both myself and him. 

His response was low and swift. ‘We are nothing alike.’

‘What, you think because I’m a junkie I don’t have a brain?’ I wasn’t even offended, just aroused by how contrary he was being. 

‘No, I think because you’re a junkie that you’re careless, and I have the legitimacy of this project hanging by the weight of my choices.’

‘Then it would benefit both you and this project that you bring the Necozine to this lab so that you can study it, since it is now irrevocably involved.’ I liked how sharp my voice could be, liked that I could change it so easily. I wasn’t imagining the sound, anymore, I was making it, and it was so fucking beautiful. 

‘We’re done with this conversation.’ With that, he stood and thrust his hand downward, forcing the chair he’d been seated on to disappear. He didn’t bother to glance at me as he turned on his heels and began shutting down the screens. As he moved, I couldn’t help but study the curve of his behind his lab coat and waited for the blood to rush to my dick. When it didn’t, I began to panic.

‘Uh, Howard -’ 

‘No,’ he said, turning quickly back to me. He came back to the bed and leaned dangerously close to my face. I couldn’t help but lick my lips. ‘This conversation is finished. I am not going to play games with someone who is putting my career on the line, and if you do anything to jeopardize this project further I will unplug you.’

Now I was frantic. The fucker was absolutely seething, fucking gorgeous in the violence of his rage and I was barely half-hard.

‘But I’m not hard,’ slipped out of my mouth and, while I should have been embarrassed, all I could do was smile. I’m nothing if I’m not honest.

‘Jesus Christ,’ came his reply before he walked briskly out of the room. 

I smirked at his shadow as it disappeared and then turned my gaze to my groin. In the dim light of the room, I finally took the opportunity to truly look at myself. No longer fearing a wound of spiders, no longer feeling as though the very weight of my bones was going to drag me to the core of the Earth, I slowly took everything in about the state of my body. 

It’s hard to describe how it feels to see oneself connected to countless tubes, to see everything familiar turned foreign with the help of machines. My skin no longer looked like skin, its pale tone rendered moist and sickly like wet parchment. The muscles in my legs had atrophied, making my shins seem sharper and less human. I started to see myself as an automaton, an oiled engine pumped full of fuel and liquid to function without destroying itself. My gears, my joints, were rusting, and I was being brought back to life. 

A fit of teenage rebellion ran through me, and I briefly toyed with the idea of pulling them all out and letting the liquid run out on the floor. I imagined the aftermath of such a petty display of anarchy with a small sort of grin. Howard would be pissed, and I’d get to look at him and say, ‘at least I unplugged myself, fucker.’ Ana would be the one cleaning up the mess, and while I wish I could say it was the respect I felt for her that stopped me from doing it the reality was that I was very much interested in not dying. Again, I’m reckless but I don’t have a death wish. 

Perhaps the strangest sensation was the expectation of feeling cold, my body uncovered and exposed with only the neoprene briefs as coverage. My body temperature was most likely being regulated by a steady flow of sodium acetate directly below the dermis, and if they were smart they would have rubbed my skin down in acethermal peroxide to keep the flesh both hydrated and elastic. 

It was such a shame that Howard was not nearly as concerned my dick couldn’t get hard as he should have been, not because I wanted to fuck him but because the flow of my blood was not entirely regular. While it’s not to say that this would not develop with due time, it was still a red flag that I decided to file away for my own observation. And no, it’s not because I love my dick and enjoy using it on a fairly frequent basis, but because, again, my non-existent death wish meant I didn’t want to have a spontaneous coronary from faulty blood flow. 

I settled back against the pillows and started listening to the beeping again. In the back of my mind, I had a small, private celebration for myself that not only was I able to speak, but I was able to process thought and had a sense of awareness. It wasn’t just that I had come out of cyrogenic liquid after one hundred years and breathe, I was able to think and remember. 

My small celebration came to a halt once even had that little thought. I was able to remember. If my memory and my speech were at this level then it wasn’t long before therapy was going to commence, and if I thought I had been through hell before, then I was a pussy and needed to man up for the trials that were laying ahead of me. 

~~~

Not long after I let the sedative regain its control of me was I awoken by the sickly familiar feeling that I was no longer alone in the room. It was not the comforting presence of Ana, who would be moving quietly to check my brain activity, heart rate, and regulate my adrenal gland. Unfortunately, it was not Howard, and I would have welcomed his anger and his arse because I had experience with them and they were human. I kept my eyes closed and waited patiently, straining my ears to listen to its breathing.

It seemed to be all around me; everywhere at once, and nowhere just the same. A metallic clicking echoed through the room, shattering the rhythmic hum of my robotic heart rate and causing the threads of my homeostasis to fray. 

It was beside me.

It was above me.

The hole in my leg was back, gangrenous and leaking a pus that soaked my skin and the sheets beneath my leg. The sheer stench of my decay made my stomach heave. I waited for the spiders, remembering that it was all just a dream, there were no spiders and this was all in my head. 

They never came. 

Instead, from the top left corner of the room where all three corners of the building met, a creature sat watching me and defying gravity with the air of nonchalance. It had no eyes, it had no face. A bulbous white mass sat in place of its head, smeared red with streaks of blood that reeked sepsis. 

I watched it, eyes wide and breath coming in shallow huffs out of my nose - panting like the insides of my heart and lungs were being constricted. Slowly, it began to work its way down the wall, cocking its head from side to side every few steps - studying me, no, studying my leg like it had found its prey. I wanted to shout at it, to tell it to fuck off, but my throat had run dry. Like a helpless child, I sat in the skeleton of my bed and watched the creature advance on my thigh like it was preparing for a meal. 

Bile slowly rose in my throat as it leaned over the bed, the smell of the blood consuming the air around me. I held my breath, hoping that I’d calm my heart and stop myself from vomiting down my chest once more. Black hands and nails reached over the railing and slithered up my leg, coming to dip into the gaping wound. 

It was toying with me, admiring how very broken I’d become and relishing the fact that I was bound to this bed, that any autonomous control I had over my body had somehow been lost.

And then it started pulling at my edges, ripping the flesh wider to bury its face within the hole and lap at the pool of blood that had collected around the muscle. I started screaming and it kept eating at me, eating me dry and hollow until the only way I could find my voice was by jerking upright and screaming ‘fuck’ loud enough for whatever God had replaced God to hear me.

Suddenly, Ana’s hand was on my forehead pressing me back into the bed. She stuck something into the juncture of my neck and collarbone, and I whimpered like a toddler going down for a nap. 

‘This is going to hurt,’ she said, not bothering to sugarcoat her words. I didn’t mind. At least she had a face, at least she warned me, at least she wasn’t feasting upon me. ‘I’m recentering the tube in your pituitary gland. Don’t even think about turning your head.’

She didn’t give me time to protest before she started splitting my head in half, my vision going white and my jaw falling slack. I thought I’d died, that I’d passed out, but I could hear her muttering under her breath and it centered me in reality. 

‘I could kill you, I really could. You did this to yourself.’ 

I wanted to tell her to get in the back of the fucking queue, behind Howard who couldn’t wait to drain me like a pipe. I wanted to tell her to fuck off and die, or maybe just die, but the searing pain behind my retinas reached its pinnacle and I blacked out before I could even start to swear. Shame. 

~~~~~

Time seemed to compress against itself, and I lost track of it during a nap that provided me fuckall relaxation. When I finally woke up and managed some semblance of coherency, I started scanning my surroundings for the places the tubes in my body connected to the source of my drug cocktail. There was a throbbing ache in the back of my head which made my eyes droop and my vision dim, but I needed to understand the science of my new life. I needed to understand how things worked, how my body worked. Strangers knew my biology better than I did, could manipulate me and my sensory perceptions without my consent because they were the ones with the control and, if anything, I needed to gain the upper hand. 

But everything was clean, tubular connections tucked under the bed or into the floor. Tubes extending into the walls or into the ceiling. For all I knew, I could have been suspended in mid-air with only the projection of a bed beneath me to keep me calm. 

My quiet analysis of the room came to a halt as Howard tore into the room like there was a rocket under his ass, and I cocked an eyebrow at his grandiose entrance. 

‘Can I help?’ I asked, dryly. 

‘I’ve returned from that little scavenger hunt you sent me on,’ he said, his voice firm and his brow set in displeasure. 

He was such a pretty fucker I just wanted to mess with him and shape his mood because I could. 

‘Oh, pleased with what you found? Did you have help from the other children?’ I smirked at him, and watched his jaw square itself to battle my verbal whiplash.

‘Yes, I’m quite pleased.’

‘So what shall you do with it, then. Study it?’ I hated that I jumped straight to the point, but beating around the bush was never one of my strong suits. The psycosematic symptoms of my withdrawal were brutal enough that I knew my sanity depended on me getting Necozine back in my hands, and I needed to know where it was and what was happening to it in order to formulate the appropriate plan for its retrieval. 

He blinked slowly at me and smiled, though it did not reach his eyes. ‘I think I’ll let you simmer for a bit on that little easter egg.’

‘I don’t need to simmer very long,’ I chuckled, reading through him.

‘Oh?’

‘I firmly believe you brought it here.’ To me, it was obvious. 

‘And what makes you think that?’

‘You’ve been living over the only existing substance of this kind for however long you’ve been assigned to this project. You invented a holographic room at seventeen, there is no shitting way you would let this little discovery just rot in the dark. You need to open it up and take it apart and study it.’ The logic of his existence and his thought process was simple because it mirrored my own. It was the symptom of being a scientist that gave away his hand - his poker face could easily be penetrated by my wit because I knew how deeply he yearned to understand every inch of his surroundings.

He avoided my statement, though, and deflected the topic as though he had planned an alternate attack. ‘And how does that make you feel? Knowing I’d drain it and make it into something else.’

Fuck. He had a point.

‘You’re not my fucking therapist.’ I looked away from him and then returned my gaze to my legs, eyes sliding up my calves and to my groin. 

‘No,’ he said, loftily. ‘ I’m not but I do get to sit in on those little sessions when we get to them. Thank you for reminding me.’

‘I wish I could say you’re welcome, but...’

I heard him walk toward the wall and begin caressing it like I had seen him previously. I raised my eyes slightly and watched him move, studying the internal processes of my body as though he were reading his prayer book.

‘No, you don’t have to the pleasure is all mine,’ he said, totally distracted.

It was easy to want him, the way he fell into science like he was falling in love. ‘And when do you want to start those little trysts of ours? Clearly I’m mentally capable.’

‘You are,’ came his firm reply, ‘but I’m going to let you burn in your little personal hell for just a bit longer before we take you out of the oven.’

‘How kind.’ Dick.

‘Mmmm.’ 

Looking back at my groin, I remembered our earlier conversation and how easily he had ignored my biological redflag. ‘We really need to talk about the fact that I can’t get hard.’

‘I really don’t want to talk about your dick.’

‘You should.’ Asshole would have been so lucky, frankly. 

‘Don’t be so crass,’ he said, looking over his shoulder at me. It was like looking at porn. 

‘Don’t be so egotistical. My dick is controlled by the flow of my blood. Me not getting hard when I know I should be aroused means there’s a clot somewhere in my body that needs to be fixed.’

‘There’s no clot.’ With that he turned back to the bed, approaching me with a casual swish of his coat and I was thrown by the absolute lack of urgency in his step. 

‘Excuse me?’

‘We’re regulating the flow of your blood due to the veycarbonate protein rebuilding the muscle in your bed. Think of it like testosterone supplements to the tenth degree. If we don’t thin and regulate your blood, we wind up amputating your legs...or your penis.’

Well. How fucking unexpected. And he just dropped that sentence like he was talking about the goddamn weather.

‘Thank you for looking out for my penis.’

I don’t think I’d ever meant anything with more sincerity than that sentence, and he ignored it completely as he walked out of the room. How fucking infuriating.


	8. Chapter 8

No one tells you what it’s like to go insane. No one talks about it because, we, as a society, understand the chemistry and the biology of it, but we don’t understand the feeling of it. Time had started to compress, slipping around me in a computerized metronome of blood flow and heart beats that had started to tell me nothing except that I was still living. They hadn’t strapped me to the bed, but I still couldn’t leave and everything about the room started to feel like a cage. Sleep had eluded me since I was pulled out, and through the exhaustion and the haze of sameness I never knew exactly when I was beyond a date of 2266. 

I was craving daylight - not the vitamin D, as I was being given a healthy dose of daily vitamins through an IV drip - the natural light and the natural warmth of it, all over my face and skin. The ceiling lights of the room provided an element of ultraviolet light, but after so many hours the falsehood of an invention began to wear a person down. It’s something you never really think about, the sun, not until you don’t have it, not until you haven’t seen it for one hundred years. 

But when one hundred years feels like three days or two weeks, time really stops mattering and then the sun itself doesn’t feel so important. 

People came and went, Ana would appear at my side like she’d always been there before disappearing into the white that seemed to drown my retinas. She’d prop me up, tilt me just enough so I could achieve a small change of view, tear my eyes from the ceiling, but the view was always the same: the wall, or my torso down to my feet. Looking at myself this way, with the same point of view and at a new version of myself that remained wholly unfamiliar started to pull at the threads of my very existence.

Because what if there was no more fucking sun? It was totally plausible, because I apparently didn’t need the sun to live anymore, it was no longer a source of energy for me, so if I didn’t need it then did anyone else? And if I was the only one who didn’t need it, the only one connected to tubes and turned into a bio-mechanical accident, then what did that make me? 

These were some fucking dangerous questions to ask myself, and the only thing that kept me grounded in the fact that I was Carbon and I was Nitrogen was the very fact that my axis rotated on addiction. Because a machine can’t get addicted, can’t crave, can’t choose a thing that would destroy them. It’s one of the laws of robotics, the point of self-survival. Addiction would be like hitting a self-destruct button if it meant causing humanity harm - it would negate their existence and they would shut down before they could even react. My bloodlust for Necozine meant I was still a person, not a project, and getting Necozine back in my hands meant reasserting the foundation of my humanity. 

After another unsleep, Ana came into the room to check my vitals and my eyes followed her curved arse around the room. There was a soreness to my lids, a weight of exhaustion and boredom that made them ache for conversation or excitement or anything other the silence of my own body. 

‘How long have I been here?’ 

‘You were pulled out ten days ago.’ 

Christ.

‘What time of day is it?’ This question was only marginally less important than the first, and I needed her to tell me it was day-time. I fucking needed to imagine that I had a window and that this was not hell. 

‘It’s just after half-three in the afternoon.’ Her ginger hair bounced a bit as she spoke, not bothering to turn to look at me. There was a smile in her voice, a lightness that made her sound distant and pre-occupied as she rotated a diagram of my heart one hundred eighty degrees. 

‘The sun is shining outside,’ I mumbled. 

‘Maybe if this were...anywhere else. But it’s cloudy here. Always is.’ 

The break of her voice as she spoke, the hesitant cadence and careful selection of words gave me pause, would have made my stomach sink if I wasn’t sedated to all hell. She was keeping secrets, locking information away from me because she didn’t think it was time or that I was stable enough to know. Fuck that, I needed answers. 

‘Where is here?’ I asked, sharply. 

‘Your vitals look good.’ She deflected the question like she hadn’t even heard it, and turned to me with a smile on her face that was the only one I found I couldn’t trust. ‘Your body isn’t filtering the drugs like we thought it would.’

I glowered at her. ‘I know you can help me with that.’ She might have lied to me about the new location, but I still respected her and felt a companionship with her that I hadn’t found with anyone else in the lab. I had woken up in a scientific utopia, and if there was any way to ease the withdrawal and filter it out she would know about it.

‘We can, yes,’ she laughed, ‘but Doctor Howard wants to make you work for the release.’ 

Her slender fingers tugged on a tube connected to my knee, and suddenly I was taken by the grace of her knuckles and the veins in her hand. The ring on her left hand sat pretty and sparkling, wrapped around the skin like it had bonded with her, woven into the skin to become a piece of her. 

‘Is he usually a cunt?’ I asked, slightly distracted by the odd metal. 

‘You don’t mean that, and you don’t know him.’ The firmness in her statement made me sneer. ‘He’s actually extremely kind, but you don’t understand how much he’s devoted himself to this project. This has been his entire life’s work.’

I cocked an eyebrow at her. If she wanted to preach at me about devotion to science, I was going to tell her to look the fuck down and really focus on what she was staring at. Devotion doesn’t extend far beyond assimilation. 

Ana caught my meaning with ease and raised a hand at me, closing her eyes and backing away as if to tell me to calm down. 

‘You might have decided to be the subject,’ she said slowly, ‘but he’s been the object of the project since he signed his contract with the ISH nine years ago.’ 

‘Ana, how do you see me.’ It wasn’t a question, not really. I needed to know her answer, needed to know what I had become so I could rework outside perceptions of myself into my own self-awareness. The very definition of me relied on a three-sixty understanding. 

‘How do you mean?’

‘Am I just data for you?’ I asked, slowly. I was choosing my words carefully, scanning through the piles of data I’d collected just by being awake and aware. ‘You’ve spent years seeing me in a glass container and now I am here speaking to you. Surely, that must change your perception of me.’

‘It isn’t just seeing you behind or in glass.’ She answered so confidently, the volume of her voice overtook the noise of the room. ‘You have to understand that everyone knows about you, regardless of their interest in science you are...a fact, a point of history.’ 

I laughed at her. Such a simple, obvious answer - like she wasn’t even trying to think through her own thoughts. ‘Trust me, I’m aware of that.’ 

‘Let me finish. We got to learn about you and read about you, but I’ve read your handwriting and I’ve seen your notes. You’ve always been real. It’s easy to lose sight of who you are when everyone knows your name and no one knows your voice. The people in this facility see you as you.’

I wanted to lift my arms up and hug her, thank her, kiss her. I couldn’t do any of that, though, so instead I watched her adjust my IV drip just by sliding her pointer finger through the air. Fucking beautiful.

‘The hero of science?’ I wiggled my eyebrows at her and watched her face light up with humour. her husband was a lucky prick. 

‘No,’ she laughed, light and musical. ‘That’s a title you’ve decided to give yourself. You are an adjustment, but you are still a person. To me and to Doctor Howard.’ 

Fucker had an odd way of showing it. He was pretty, and I knew from the conversation I had overheard between him and Ana that his so called devotion to the project had the potential to extend well beyond the desired limit. I wanted to exploit it, see how far I could push it before it broke. I wanted to test him while he tested me. 

‘We’re going to start your therapy tomorrow,’ Ana said, breaking my thought process. She had wandered over the wall in front of my bed and was slowly turning a model of my knee around in a circle. 

My awe of the room was only broken by the implication of her words. 

‘Lovely.’ Fucking fantastic. ‘Didn’t Howard want me to “rot in hell” for a bit before we started?’

‘He didn’t say that.’

‘I’m paraphrasing.’

‘He didn’t say that, and that was two days ago. Your muscles have regained enough mass to support your weight.’ She zoomed in on the patella, and highlighted the cartilage. I couldn’t tell if she was looking for something or merely showing me my progress. ‘It’s time we stop rebuilding them with the protein and have you work them naturally.’

I snorted. ‘One hundred years of progress and you still need me to do some work.’

‘Nothing beats nature, unfortunately.’

‘Lovely,’ I repeated.

‘You wrote the notes on what you would have to go through.’ She said it like I was the one to blame, and I shot a seething glare at the back of her head.

‘Yeah, that’s precisely why I’m not looking forward to it.’

She removed the model of my knee with a wave of her hand, sending the three dimensional image back into the second and turned off the wall. ‘Is there anything I can get for you?’ she asked, typing notes into a glass board. 

‘A change of scenery? A meal? Fucking, a book to read maybe?’ I was absolutely fucking desperate. 

‘You know I can’t do any of those things for you,’ she said sadly, though she didn’t bother to look up from her notes. ‘Too much brain activity, to much change, and your stomach can’t handle solids yet. You know that.’

‘Then what the fuck was the point of the question?’ I growled. ‘What the fuck is the point of you? I don’t need your politeness if you can’t follow through.’

I should have felt bad after my snide remarks, but she had grown used to my temper and merely walked out of the room with a sigh and a slight shrug of her shoulders. Though she hadn’t intended to leave me with much entertainment, our brief conversation had left me with a few things to ponder. 

Firstly, she would not tell me where we were. Of course, revealing anything about history before the official start of therapy not only was against the parameters of both her title and the project itself, but also risked the stability of my mental well-being. Clearly, she wasn’t stupid enough to fuck with either of these things, but she had planted a seed in my brain. A lot happens in one century, hell we all remember how quickly history changed between 1935 and 2001. Society was a victim of progress, and history had continued to repeat itself in that vein for centuries after. Hell, 2145 felt nothing like 2160, and that was only a fifteen year gap. Something in our geography had been broken, and she refused to tell me where or when it had occurred. 

Secondly, she had alluded to the fact that my body was unable to filter the Necozine. Granted, it was trying to - this is the very definition of withdrawal - but the drug refused to leave my system. The body itself is a biological piece of technology. Any material system programmed for self-preservation is capable of filtering material that it deems useful and retaining it in order to adapt to it. If my body refused to relinquish the Necozine, then it must have considered it useful - the drug must have had a purpose beyond getting me high as shit and making the world at least sixty percent more interesting. 

But of course we have to consider that my body didn’t expect to be frozen for one hundred years, let alone frozen with a chemical accident stored in the blood stream. Residual effects of the drug meant my occipital lobe would have been slightly expanded and parts of my cerebral cortex would have been manipulated outside the regulations of the test experiments. Freezing myself with the Necozine still a part of my system had the potential of changing the drug itself. If Howard didn’t think he needed to study the living shit out of Necozine he was fucking stupid. 

And because I was positively gagging for a fix, that made me even worse than him. 

~~~~

I’d fallen asleep at some point, my eyes drooping enough to provide my mind some well deserved peace. My comfort was short lived, however, a sinkhole in my skin opening up not long after I had drifted.

My eyes shot open, scanning the room and the ceiling for any creature who wanted to get inside me or become me. 

There was nothing. Everything was quiet. 

I was alone in the room and, for a moment, I breathed a sigh of relief. Everything was as it should have been, and the pain in my leg may have been a cause of an incorrect amount of aceteprophane in my IV. It was ok. This could be fixed. I was going to be fine. 

But then I noticed I had been covered with a sheet, and that was terribly wrong. A sheet would disrupt the tubes, could get caught and tug on things it wasn’t meant to; being covered meant I was hallucinating and I needed to prepare myself.

‘Using the fucking door this time?’ I called. ‘Finally learned some goddamn manners?’

Nothing. Silence.

‘Speak to me, motherfucker! Or do you not have a mouth this time?’

Beneath the flesh of my leg, buried deep under the dermis, I felt something move. It was slow and moved in waves, as though it was crawling along its back; worming its way through my chemistry. 

I broke out in a sweat and started to feel the bile build in my throat once more, and I couldn’t help but release a whimper.

It was coming closer, reaching the head of the sinkhole in my leg, which had started to stain the white sheet with a black liquid that looked like ink. It wasn’t my blood - or maybe it was and the oxygen had left my chemical makeup completely, rendered useless by the creature that had grown within me. 

I was frantic as I felt it climb halfway out of my leg and started yanking, throwing my arms out and over the blanket, screaming at the agony of prematurely moving my muscles. With one heaving pull, I threw the blanket off my legs and stared in horror as a large millipede slowly worked its way out of my leg. 

Helpless, I let my reality collapse around me as it chewed its way through my skin and into existence. It pulled itself out, winged and bloodied, carrying pieces of my bleeding flesh with it as it tried to escape the room in flight. 

I had started screaming so loudly I felt the back of my throat scratch and burn, my hands coming to my face to scratch and peel at my cheeks.

I scratched and clawed and ripped at my skin until I could feel my cheekbones beneath my fingertips. Pulling my hands away, I studied the blackness of my fingers and realized I smelled of oil.

I was oil. I was skin. I was bone. I was liquid. I was engine. I was broken. I was flawed.

I was black.

Everything was black. 

~~~

I nursed myself through the night terrors, a habit I was slowly getting used to since Howard had ordered I suffer for a bit. Appropriate medications were in place, but it was down to me to wake up, to calm down and to keep breathing. The following morning, I shot a glare at Ana, a look at that implied this fucking asshole wants me dead and there is no way you can convince me he sees me as anything more than an experiment. If she saw it, or understood it, she simply ignored it as she came to stand beside my bed, tilting me upwards, and stared expectantly at the door. 

Howard came in, followed quickly by a woman with dark hair and wide eyes. His pretty fucking face wore a smile I wanted to slap off his mouth, so I chose instead to stare at the matronly woman to whom I had not been introduced.

‘Doctor Bellamy,’ she said, her voice low and brisk. I instantly smiled, hearing my title for the first time since waking up. ‘My name is Doctor Reeves, but you can call me Johanna. I am your physical therapist.’

‘How hard was it getting clearance to come into this project?’ I asked, knowing that I had made it exceptionally difficult for any specialist to be granted access, not just to the experiment but, to the building. In order to be hired, they had to be good - they had to be astonishingly accomplished. They had to, essentially, be me. 

‘Bellamy,’ Howard sighed.

‘No,’ Johanna said, smirking. ‘It was a fun challenge. I applied four times before I was hired. I imagine you’re someone who admires persistence?’

‘Indeed I am,’ I replied, returning a smile.

She tapped a wall panel beside the bed, watching with a small smile as it opened to push a table out into the room. Atop it was a collection of instruments the likes of which I had never seen. 

‘We’re going to start with your arms,’ she said, picking up two circular bands that looked like steel. She handed one to Ana, and together they pulled lightly on the rims to release the connection. ‘These bands have been calibrated to the diameter of your biceps, so they will be rather snug. They have to be. You’ll soon understand why.’

They placed both bands on the center of my biceps, the steel coming to close as soon as they were in place. 

She offered me no warning as she tapped a button on a keypad she lifted from her labcoat pocket, her lips pursing as she did so. 

Red light crawled down my arms, and I watched with mild interest as my skin began to look like mesh netting. And then everything started to sting.

‘Should this -’ I was cut off by excruciating pain. ‘Christ!’

‘I know, I’m sorry. I would have warned you but expectation makes it worse, I’ve found. Best not to focus on it.’

Howard was giggling.

‘Shut your fucking mouth,’ I growled at him. ‘Tell me what’s happening. Understanding makes it easier for me to get through it. I’m not your usual guinea pig.’

Johanna blinked at me briefly before she started to speak. ‘The electrical current is forcing your muscles to contract and expand at a rapid rate. Think of it like swimming or bench pressing at a rate of seventy kilometers an hour. Obviously, that’s not what’s happening since your muscles would deteriorate, but it’s a simple way of understanding the strength building technique.’

I squeezed my eyes shut and breathed through my nose, taking in every word she was saying. It made sense. It had to make sense. And suddenly, the pain started to subside, my breathing started to even out.

‘How are you doing that?’ Ana asked.

‘Doing what?’ I mumbled.

‘The test was specifically designed to study both your muscles and your nervous system. You’re easing the pain yourself.’

‘If I understand how something works, it makes it easier to understand the pain, and then I can fight through it.’

‘I’ve never heard of...’ Ana’s voice drifted away from her statement, and I could hear Howard cough.

‘You wanted to know how I work. That’s the first thing you need to understand.’

I felt hands come to my biceps and the bands get lifted. Opening my eyes, I scanned everyone’s face to study their perception of the test. Howard seemed pleased, which was the first time I saw him be anything other than terse. I wanted to toss confetti in his fucking face. 

My scan for attention was short lived as I felt Ana pull tubes from my left arm, and I watched as she worked quickly to catch the liquid that spilled after each opened hole. Clear liquid would come in a flood before my blood, red and bright would follow suit. She cauterized each wound with an ease that bordered on gracefulness, before Howard and Johanna backed up to let her do the other side. She worked and moved around my bed and my body like it was her sole purpose. It was fucking hard not to love Ana, damn near impossible not to fall in love with her. 

She stood back once every tube had been removed and smiled so brightly I stopped missing the sun for a moment.

‘Lift your arms,’ she said happily. 

I looked back at my arms and let out a long exhale. This was going to hurt the first time, I knew it would.

‘Does anything...not hurt anymore?’ I asked, positive no one would understand the question.

‘Unfortunately, we haven’t been able to eradicate pain,’ came Johanna’s answer. 

I took in a deep breath and heaved my arms, listening to my joints creak with effort. Holding them in the air for several seconds, I allowed my body to get used to the work and the soreness, before I eased them back down. 

‘Good job! Once more.’ I heard Johanna tinker around on the table beside the bed, her voice encouraging but distracted. I was too busy focusing on the weight of my elbows.

I lifted my arms once more, smiling at the ease with which I was able to accomplish such a menial task, and brought them down quickly.

‘And again,’ Johanna said, softly. 

One last time, I lifted my arms, the action feeling exactly how I remembered it: simple and weightless. 

‘Beautiful. Now for the fun part.’ 

Johanna came to the foot of the bed and smiled directly at me before leaning down to pull it away from the wall. A panic started to cycle through my veins and I wanted to tell her to stop, that I had tubes in my neck and back and brain, and that this would kill me. But she pulled the bed forward and I felt Ana reaching behind me, pulling and cauterizing in a rhythm that made the entire process absolutely painless. I felt the air touch my back and metal follow soon after, I felt the liquid spill and the flow stop. She worked so quickly behind me that she was finished before I could even get upset I couldn’t watch her. 

‘Have I been numbed?’ I asked.

‘No,’ Ana said, stepping beside the bed and placing the head of her tool into her pocket. ‘The majority of my training as your nurse centered on that very moment. I’ve been waiting for that moment for eight years. Thank you for surviving.’

I blinked at her, bewildered. ‘Thank you for not killing me.’ 

‘Sit up,’ Johanna said, bringing me back to the task at hand. 

‘I’d love to but my abdominal muscles haven’t been prepared for that,’ I said flatly.

‘How do you think you sat up the other night?’ Howard asked.

I rolled my eyes and turned to scowl at him. ‘Are you really so caught up and obsessed with my hallucinations that you’re bringing them up now.’

‘Obsessed and pissed off are two different emotions. And you’ve been heavily sedated. Doesn’t matter how shit your drug addled little brain is, you wouldn’t have been able to sit up if we hadn’t been building protein and slowly shocking your muscles from the start.’

It was the first time I’d heard him swear, and I couldn’t help but lick my lips as the word rolled off his tongue. 

‘Come on,’ Johanna said, interrupting us. ‘Sit up.’

Lifting my arms was child’s play compared to controlling the majority of my body mass. It required a veritable fuck ton of concentration, and more than a little panting, but my body raised itself, my spine curled with a slight hunch, and soon I was sitting up in the bed like it required no work at all.

‘And now for my favourite part.’ There was glee all over Johanna’s voice, and I watched her walk over to the table with a cocked eyebrow. ‘These,’ she said, lifting a pair of boots, ‘are what got me this job.’

‘Oh?’

‘Ana is going to remove the tubes in your legs and then I am going to slip these on. And then,’ she said, pausing for a moment. ‘You are going to walk.’ 

A slight thrill overtook me, causing my body to spasm briefly at the concept. Movement. Controlled, autonomous movement based on my whims and my desires. I wanted to rip the tubes out of Ana’s hands as she slowly pulled them free, wanted to pull them all out and bleed out over the bed because it meant getting the fucking boots on my feet faster. 

Speech was one thing. Hearing my voice and being able to speak my mind was only part of what it meant to be alive. Leaving the bed and gaining my free will meant getting on with my life, meant becoming part of the future if there were no pieces of my life left to reassemble. 

Johanna slipped the boots up to my calves, wearing a smile fit for a god as she did so. The boots themselves had three metal bands that wrapped around the calf and a brace along the back for stability. The sole was made of a rubber I couldn’t help reaching down and touching, simply because I could. 

I turned my body to face the side of the bed and paused, watching as my three spectators parted to make room for my staggered walk. Truthfully, I expected more of a crawl than anything, and they needed to give me a wider girth if they wanted to not get wounded in the process. 

‘On the count of three, I want you to slide off the bed and rest on your feet.’

‘No jumping?’ I asked.

‘Not if you want to shatter your knee caps.’

‘No jumping it is.’ 

‘Alright. One.’

I took a deep breath.

‘Two.’

Braced myself for the fall.’

‘Three’

And let myself go.

‘Well done.’

Standing on my own two feet, at full height, posture well aligned. I couldn’t help myself and burst into laughter. 

‘Fuck me,’ I whispered.

‘You’re only half done,’ Johanna said, giggling along with me. ‘Now, I want you to walk. The boots are designed to keep you stable, to pad and catch the weight and shock of your steps.

I looked around me and everyone, even Howard, was smiling like they knew something I didn’t. I wanted to sit back down, not move until they told me what the fuck was going on, but I was too excited to become myself again to focus on their secret. 

People don’t talk about insanity because they don’t understand it, the same way they don’t talk about walking because everyone can do it. Moving my feet at a normal pace felt as refreshing as learning to speak after days of silence and failed attempts at communication. Walking, even with assistance of some bullshit technology of the future, seemed to reaffirm the fact that I was living, that I was breathing, that I was whole. Because the reality is that science doesn’t put itself on hold for you, it doesn’t pause or wait or take into account how imperative your contribution to it is. It keeps moving forward because it has to, and when you finally rejoin the party, your voice is the least significant voice in the room. Now that I was walking, now that I was living, my voice had purpose behind its speech.

‘Look down,’ Howard said, as I walked around the room.

I furrowed my brow, my train of thought broken as I meandered at a leisurely pace, and looked down at my feet as I moved. I stopped dead.

‘What the fucking shit -’ I cut myself off.

No boots. Just my bare feet.

‘The boots dissolve once you find your center. The reality being that the boots never really existed,’ Johanna said. I could hear the smile in her voice, but I was too busy looking at my toes on the white tiles. ‘They’re a holographic pod that shuts itself down and rests on the floor once your pace is set. The body, the mind, thinks it can’t move without assistance. It’s a visual placebo, and you’ve been doing it yourself this whole time.’

Okay. Not bullshit technology. Absolutely fucking beautiful technology.


End file.
